Time: 5 Months
FISHYHEIST
PROJECT DETAILS
Game-A-Week project I worked solo on. The theme of the week was Couch Co-op. Out of the
projects on this page, Fishyheist is by far my most modern design project, in terms of design
methods, philosophy and journaling.
What makes Fishyheist a unique experiment was my use of MDMA journaling, and my personal
process of re-defining what a genre is. It did not achieve all of its design goals, but it did get
somewhere cool.
For my Game-A-Week class, we were tasked with making a co-op game. While others were
coming up with their own concepts & teaming up, I knew next to nothing about co-op, and wanted
to do something unique- to strip down the entire genre, then re-work my way up with very simple
mechanics.
It started with a prototype. My initial idea was a game with fun, yet tense social dynamic
potential- something very modern at the time, with games like Chained Together, Overcooked
and It Takes Two in the limelight. So I made the prototype one with a frustrating control system,
one that would take some time to get used to.
The general sentiment with my playtesters then was that it was the right amount of frustrating.
It was fun, learnable, and had some hidden mechanics that made it work (Random accele
speed boosts at the start, more specific design distances, etc)
Then began the process of transitioning that prototype to Co-op. This page will go further on
this transition.
My Role: Lead Designer, Lead Programmer
GAME IDEATION
GAME PILLARS
MAIN INSPIRATIONS
The first question I asked myself was what if we stripped co-op down to its core, and rebuilt it around the pillars of some of the top co-op games & my personal strengths combined? I am a Mechanic Designer, I have some technical skill, and my favorite co-op games at the moment are Chained Together and Overcooked 2.
Rather than chase Genre tropes, I approached the design with a systemic mindset. The goal was to first of all divide this into two sections: the player-based level design methodologies, and then the multiplayer methodologies.
Player-based designs were simple. I looked for skill metrics each level's difficult will be tweaked based upon: Positioning/Timing, Deceleration, Rotation, and Control/swerve. Then, we looked for "feel" methodologies, and those were: Dribbling styles, emotional flow, pacing (breather rooms? high-intensity sections?), among others.
The real gold however was with my multiplayer research. The question asked here was, what's the difference between a simple fun 2 player experience and a 1 player experience with the same game, without directly mentioning the fact that its 2 player?
I visited Wii Party's minigames which offer a wide variety of 1-pair minigames, and games like Overcooked 2. I've made some interesting observations here:
1. The decision making process over who goes where, in its own, is multiplayer core. So we're already in the right territory with this game design
2. Collective pressure, as in both players working at the same time to achieve something.
3. Players are more motivated by being watched or by being with team members.
From there, I grew more confident to stick with the current prototype, and I began designing several level mechanics & team/story dynamics.
Fun, responsive, yet slippery movement
Tense, yet playful social dynamics
Smooth, engaging Level Design that keeps you engaged, and
is clear on first sight.
Chained Together (Top inspiration)
Overcooked 2
N++ (Level Design, 2nd top inspiration)
Wii Party (Solving design questions)
PROTOTYPE DESIGN
TTF: TOY, TARGET-AUDIENCE, FANTASY
Initially, the idea was simple: A fish that has 3 buttons: Rotate & Accelerate. It ticks a nice part of my brain when there's a one hold, two
rotate button scheme, like in driving games such as Forza Horizon or Need for Speed, and only the rotation is held longer here.
The prototype was finished in a few hours, and was already out for testing the next day. My friend Simon tried it and thought it's good
but the values needed some tweaking to feel more controllable. I went with his advice, and I felt making it easier would make the
concept more accessible to players on an advanced level.
Some of the key points applied during the prototype's creation:
Rotate to set direction, and you can only thrust otherwise. Both rotation & thrust speeds are accelerated, meaning your speed increases
over time.Gravity drags you down, adding a deceleration boost to the acceleration up & adding a timing element to positioning your acceleration
Random acceleration boost on W tap, adding unpredictability to how fast you move or jitter before reaching top speed.
A timer where you go into overdrive, where holding accelerate for too long gives you a sudden, tough to control speed boost.
Rotating slows you down. Deceleration will not be very speedy but players will be able to do rotations to last-ditch stop themselves.
This allowed for responsiveness & room for mastery potential. Top players will potentially know how to work with these physics.
While this is a Game Design portfolio, I dabbled a lot with Level Design in this game, and it taught me a lot about my own forte. The idea was
never just to make levels, but to engine social situations, what I called “cooperative dilemmas.” These ranged from “who goes first?”
decisions to real-time crisis-solving under pressure. It’s this tension, not just the challenge, that made Fishyheist shine.
But it also taught me something- I understood what makes a genre what it is by asking: What decisions are players making, and how are
they making those decisions?
Think about it. A puzzle makes you say how do I solve this? You put your puzzle thinking hats and do it. A platformer makes you ask when
do I jump/shoot? You are working with different questions in each game's core.
But with Co-op we're dealing with a different beast. Instead of I, and it's now we. There's a planning process, a new source of tension, a
new penalty, and a whole world on the line plugged into the game. And I as the designer want to feast on that.
The game's reception at Playtest Evening was pretty good! At testing, while players struggled a lot
with the first level, they seemed to be keen to want to set things right and progress.
Other players however, who had experience with platformers, dashed through the early levels,
and I even partnered up with a player who looked very good, and we almost reached level 10.
Some of the feedback I got was that it was the "right type of masochistic", others were very
animated as they played the game- shouting in laughter at their teammates' mistakes, laughing at
the very simple yet dumb systems. What truly made this game shine however is how unpunishing
death was, as players were warped to the starting point immediately.
However, the game did have some glaring flaws & planning failures. The first level was painfully
difficult, and players struggled badly on it. The level design was consistently fresh but difficulty
spikes proved I didn't have the ability to empathize with the player over such a long period of
time, although this would not be a problem if I had better playtesting resources. The pacing was
not as fast as I'd hoped it'd be, with players struggling on easier levels, and pros (experienced with
games like Geometry Dash..) getting past the first 5 or so levels with ease.
No game juice got added to the game in the one week of initial development, the story planned
was never shown (the Heist elements never got into the game- there were planned cutscenes to
serve as interludes between levels), and some of the game's greater ambitions failed to come
together.
The design itself was a little flawed, particularly level elements being too tough, and the initial
playable character being too tough to control especially for newbies. If we exclude a few
platformer-experienced players, the average death count for most players on the first level had
to be 50 or so. But still, on a personal level however I was glad that I managed to release a fully
playable, almost glitch-free executable in just one week.
DYNAMICS DESIGN
RECEPTION
The TTF model I experiment with is now developing a stronger shape, one influenced by the MDA framework. We now target diverse
audiences, assemble varied fantasies that click together simultaneously (Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic vs. Short-term intrinsic), find ways to
integrate them in together, and while the Toy section is mostly not seeking new developments, I'm now experimenting more with what
works and what doesn't to expand it, and using techniques I have used in previous works- in this case, using the game's slippery mechanics
to offer a higher skill ceiling.
Some key points that I haven't declared before.
The game started as a concept first, and then I began filling in some of the first boxes in the TTF model. The idea was what I wanted
"frustrating" co-op that reinforces fun multiplayer dynamics, and the controls to be a fun rotation-based thrusting fish, inspired by
driving games.The fantasy was simple. You play as two fish commiting a bank heist. This allows for goofiness, sharpness, cuteness, and other
certain flavors to be applied to the game.The class' rules were that games had to be finished in a week. Unfortunately, I could not scope for everything to be done in a week,
so a lot of the ideas you see could not make the final game, however the most pivotal & essential ones did, which is great.
With developments in the TTF model, I additionally worked on games for research. I picked two games to prioritize: Overcooked 2, and N++.
N++ to me matched the game's dynamics a lot more than many other games, and the Ninja fantasy really felt similar to the fish commiting
a bank heist theme. This told me I was in the right territory, and so I began my analysis.
Download Prototype (itch.io)
Read MDMA Journal (Pastebin)
Engine: Unity
Time: 1 Week
Team: Solo
