Two Kids Stacked On Top of Each Other In A Trench Coat Pretending To Be An Adult: Creative Brief

Genre: 3rd-Person 2-Player Cooperative 3D Puzzle-Platformer

Our Team:

Gameplay: Andy Chan, Murtaza Latif, Manyu “Flora” Wang, Wei Cui

Audio: Josh Sparks, Janise Ku

Art: Logan Hyde, Mandy Luu,  Adriana Lee

Main mechanics (Overview):

Our game is a 2-player cooperative puzzle-platformer. Each of the two players controls a different kid, and both kids have the option to stack on top each other to change form from two separate kids to a single disguised adult-form. 

When both players are stacked on top of each other, they effectively combine into a single playable character. One player controls movement and has to worry about lifting their partner, and the other player does the majority of interactions and has to worry about balancing on their partner.

Also, each of the two kids have their own unique skill set (to be decided), and their combined adult-form varies depending on which player is the kid on top and which player is the kid on the bottom.

Each form and adult-form variation will react differently to different obstacles, so switching between forms and variations of the adult-form will be important. This forces both players to experience all the mechanics of the game and will hopefully help keep things fresh by not letting players stay in one form all the time.

Some examples of obstacles may include: A zone with a guard that kicks out kids/adults that walk into the area, areas that are too short for the kid-forms to reach or too tall/large for the adult-form to reach. (There’s some work to be done in the obstacles department for sure).

Main Mechanics (Detailed) And Gameplay Decisions:

Currently for the top-player’s balancing mechanic, we think a good approach would be to have both players “move” when stacked on top of each other; however, only one player actually moves the pair while the other tries to synchronize their movement within a margin of error to maintain balance. If the player on top fails to balance, then that player falls off in the opposite direction of the bottom-player’s movement.

For the bottom-player’s lifting mechanic, we are still in the early stage of deciding what would be the most fun approach. 

We are still deciding what perspective/camera view the players will have, but we will definitely be using a 3rd-person perspective.

Inspirations:

A large inspiration for this game idea is Portal because the game centers all of its puzzle-platforming elements around it’s main mechanic, creating portals. We plan on taking a similar approach for our game as well.

Another inspiration is Octodad: Dadliest Catch. In the game’s co-op mode, you can divide the controls of the main character’s 4 limbs between up to 4 players in any configuration. The co-op mode takes a lot of coordination between players and we want our game to have a similar level of coordination in the combined adult-form. Also, the game is just very ridiculous and doesn’t take itself too seriously, and we want our game to have that kind of energy.

What we think is special about our game!

We think that our central mechanic has lots of potential to be very fun.

In the combined adult-form, players have to cooperate in a manner similar to octodad; in the kid-form, players get to experience more conventional puzzle-platformer elements. Because levels will require both forms/variations, there should be lots of room for variation between levels instead of just harder and harder versions of the same type of level.

We hope that the obstacles/levels that force players to get creative and switch between both forms and variations will be fun and rewarding for players. And, we also hope that the silliness of the game and the coordination elements will give the game lots of replayability.

Moodboard/Aesthetics:

The aesthetic/mood for our game is still up for debate within our group, but we do want to maintain the silliness and lightheartedness of the concept/central mechanic itself.

Some of the moods we considered were: 

• A mix of mystery/fantasy elements
• Wacky and silly
  • Like Untitled Goose Game or Knights and Bikes
• Kids’ imagination
  • Similar to games like little Misfortune, Child of Light, Night In The Woods, where you walk a fine line between reality and imagination