DETAILED GAME DESIGN PROCESS
THE SECRET PROTO-COOP
This page details the systems of the game The Secret Proto-Coop.
It's a cooperative game where the first player plays as a secret agent in first-person view in VR while the other players his support agent with a top-view plan on a mobile device.
The goal for the players it to make the VR player reach the end of the level without dying, and mostly without being detected by the guards and cameras.
We thought this game in a systemic way, because we had a very limited time and manpower to carry out this project, and we needed to achieve a professional level of polishing to publish it.
This page will describe these systems and their interactions.
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Another important stake for me was creating enough content and replayability despite the fact that our game was level-based.
I. DEFINING THE EXPERIENCE
We had the chance to have a very clear idea of the desired player experience for The Secret Proto-Coop.
The base of this player experience comes from the duet between two very powerful archetypes: the field agent, infiltrating an enemy base; and his teammate the support agent, helping him remotely and keeping him safe.
The pictures above beautifully depict this duality. We showed these images to the team and used them in order to create a common vision: everyone had a clear idea of where we wanted the game going. I think this decision played a very important part in the fact that the game ended up respecting the targeted player experience accurately.
As a game designer, my first mission on the project was to translate this vision into design intentions and into a game dynamic. I knew that a good set of features would stem from this dynamic: one that would support the player fantasy of the duet of secret agents.
Here are three pillars I came up with:
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First pillar:
a constant communication
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Second pillar :
timed coordination challenges
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Third pillar:
balanced
interdependence
First, it was important to create a constant communication between the player to emphasize the fact that they work together and not just in parallel. In terms of game design, I associated this with the asymmetry of information. Both players see different things, but they have to combine their information in order to progress. Players who don’t communicate enough can’t overcome the obstacles.
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Then comes the coordination between both players. Here again, it was inspired by the image of the secret agents who decide a strategy and synchronize their actions in order to make it work. It’s exactly what we wanted to recreate in The Secret Proto-Coop. I associated this with the asymmetry of competence: at the same point, the players will need an action of their teammate to move forward to the next challenge.
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Finally, we were aware that the VR gameplay is often seen as more attractive than the mobile gameplay, and we wanted to avoid that. We also wanted to make both parts of the game (VR & mobile) equally important, and to avoid the mobile player to end up just being a GPS, giving direction and being passive. To achieve this, we kept a close eye on the actions that both players realize to finish a level. We made sure that there is never one player that is acts more than the other.
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Now, let’s take a look at these 3 design pillars, and at the pictures that depict our player fantasy. Now we can see the game dynamic emerge. With this dynamic in mind, I proceeded to imagine the tools of both players. I kept in mind the fact that these tools should give different information and abilities, but also be equally powerful.
II. A SOLID CORE SYSTEM
The first tool that is unique to the VR player is his direct vision of the environment. It may seem obvious, but it’s actually a very important distinction. As he has a FPS view, he can see the details of the environment and notably what is on the walls for example.
In order to respect the fantasy of the special agent, the VR player also has a gun that he can use to eliminate the enemies he sees if they are isolated.
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The mobile player has a 3D top-view plan of the environment, granting him vision way further away than his teammate. He can see beyond walls whereas they would obstruct the field agent’s sight.
The second unique tool to the mobile player is inspired by the idea of the support agent that is a hacker who helps his field agent by infiltrating the security system. In The Secret Proto-Coop, the support agent can see the electrical elements and hack them, thus deactivating them for a short time.
We now have the very core of the game loop: the VR player can see and shoot guards, but he has no information on the security systems. It’s the opposite for the mobile agent, who can hack into the security systems (hidden traps, cameras) to temporarily deactivate them.
Therefore, they need to communicate on what they see and to coordinate their action to realize them within the hack timers. They also both have responsibilities.
The next step is getting this game loop even more interesting by adding interactions between its actors. For this, I needed to find ‘bridges features’, which are features generating new interactions in the system. In this case, it was important to create feature requiring inputs from both players, to emphasize on the fact that their actions are intertwined.
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Here's the game loop we ended with after a few weeks of ideation playtest and adjusting:
We can quickly deconstruct what happened between these two loops.
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First, the field agent has now way more tools than just the gun. The two pictograms on the left of the gun represent the field agent's abilities to distract the guards with a sound, and to drag their corpses (to move them away from the sight of another guard or a camera).
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After several playtest, it was obvious that the VR player (surprisingly!) was not active enough and often waited for his friend to figure out how to deactivate all problematic traps and cameras. This is why we added the sound distraction and the corpse-dragging mechanics.
These features work perfectly. It strengthens the need for coordination, as it allowed me to create level design where the field agent has to coordinate with the support agent to kill a guard and drag its corpse during the timing where a camera is deactivated (see here samples of my level design work on The Secret Proto-Coop).
A mistake in the player's coordination often lead to game over, which is exactly what we intended. After we added these features, our playtesters reported that they really felt the need of a flawless coordination in their action.
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The next features that were added to the game are those represented on orange on the game loop. These are obstacles that do not instantly trigger a game over (unlike the guards, traps and cameras).
These features just block the players' progress and create more bridges between the two players, so they really feel like they need each other.
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The first one is the jammer. It's a 3D object on a wall that only the VR player can see and destroy (a bullet does the job). While the jammer is active, it incapacitates the hacking abilities of the support agent.
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The second one is the encrypted door. Encrypted doors are locked and require a specific code to be opened. The support agent has a codename and a grid of 18 symbols. He needs to enter the right combination of 3 symbols to decipher it into the 3-digits code that will open the door.
The field agent has to find the place in the level where the symbols are displayed. There are several combinations of 3 symbols, each one associated to one codename. He then has to enter the right 3-digits code on the digicode next to the encrypted door.
This creates a bilateral communication, as seen on the loop below.
Below is a mock-up of the panel that the support agent sees on mobile.
The codename would appear on the top-left corner, and the digits corresponding to the symbols he taps on the right.
III. THE 'CONTENT' ISSUE
The playtests were really promising with this version of the game, but there was one more issue I had to deal with.
The assignment asked that the game had a certain level of polish for the game to be in a state in which it could be released. This meant that we needed to be able to offer a lot of content. However, with a team of 11 students working on their free time on the project, it is impossible to produce that much content. We needed a trick.
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To ensure a good replayability, even for a level-based game, I suggested to implement two more features.
The first one is a semi-random level generation. Instead of designing entire levels, I chose to design 'rooms' that were either easy, medium or hard. Then, the game could generate a level by combining rooms at random from the pools of easy, medium and hard rooms.
Therefore, the game can provide different levels at each run, but the level would remain balanced in terms of difficulty curve.
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The second feature is a set of gameplay modifiers increasing the difficulty and altering the experience of our levels. The players can decide to activate these modifiers before they start a run.
These modifiers can be:
• a room with the lights off and where the field agent has to progress with a flashlight that regularly switch off and need to be reactivated by the support agent,
• a room where the support agent can't see the real-time position of the field agent on his map, thus increasing the difficulty and the stake of their communication,
• a room where the oxygen is being depleted, forcing the players to find the oxygen valve and to turn it simultaneously.