Designer Guide to 3-Platform-Assymetric Collaboration Game

To make players collaborate, you need to assign different abilities to them.
To let players laugh together, you need to allow their abilities to interact with each other.

Weekly Update

Hello everyone! This week, our team, IT TAKES THREE, held our weekly meeting to align on our core goals and plan for the next iteration of our asymmetric collaboration game. It’s been an intensive period following our Halves Presentation, and the feedback we’ve received is shaping our path forward.

Our Core Mission

The heart of our project is to create an asymmetric collaboration game across three unique platforms: VR, PC, and Mobile. The experience is designed for three Gen-Z players to connect with each other locally, much like inside a dedicated game room.

Our definition of success hinges on ensuring that each player feels three key things:

• Fun: The gameplay must be unique and comfortable.
• Significance: Each player must feel they influence the game’s outcome.
• Connection: The players must feel synchronized with each other.

Post-Playtest and Halves Feedback

Following our Halves Presentation and recent playtests, we’ve gathered crucial feedback that is driving our immediate next steps. The consensus points us toward a few key areas of focus:

1. Build Significance: We need to implement more interactions for both the PC and Phone players to ensure they feel truly impactful.
2. Generate Fun Beyond Functionality: The game needs to be fun outside of simply completing tasks.
3. Aesthetics Alignment: Our art and visual style must be aligned with our Concept, Reference, Outlook, and World (CROW).

The Week Ahead: Tasks and Features

Our task list is broken down into three main areas—Art, Design, and Engineering—to tackle the feedback head-on.

Art and Sound

• Animation: Focus on Cat animation.
• Visuals: We are refining the VR Hand to better align with our CROW, potentially by changing its texture. We are also creating 3D art for generic building structures to replace the current “white box” areas in the scene.
• Sound: Designing a new SFX cue and replacing existing SFX.

Design

• Level Design: We plan to leverage the current mechanisms to utilize more of the 3D space in our level design. A key task is developing a dedicated tutorial level.
• Interaction Design: We are exploring new mobile inputs, specifically if using shake (clockwise, counter-clockwise, or vertical) can map to three directional push actions. We are also focused on adding more unique interactions for both the PC and Phone players.

Gameplay & Engineering

This week’s engineering goals are split between bug fixing and implementing exciting new features.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixing a bug where destructible walls are not destructible.
• Resolving an issue where the PC player is unable to move/rotate on a rotatable platform while the VR player is rotating it.
• Improving the accuracy of the shake/rotate detection on the Phone player.
• Preventing the VR controller from accidentally controlling PC player movement.

New Features:

• PC Player: Adding a “Meow button” (press ‘?’ to meow).
• Mobile Player: New input control will use the shake mechanism for an omni-dash, and the original on-screen wheel will be repurposed as a “wheel of emotion”.
• VR Player: We are testing to see if we can implement Distance Grab, allowing the VR player to grab objects from further away.

We’re also entertaining some interesting stretch ideas, such as having the VR player work as a way to connect electric wires within the game world.

Stay tuned for more updates as we bring “IT TAKES THREE” closer to its final form!