Ali'N Co.

Context

"Platium Project" in IIM as an A3. The only constraint was to create a couch game. The team was composed of 4 GameDesigners, 4 GameProgrammers, 2 GameArtists and 2 external Sound Designers from Audio Workshop. Ali'N Co. is a coop game played from 2 to 4 people. You play as a warehouse management team on behalf of a large delivery company. The goal is simple, store the boxes in the right places... But the conditions of this job make it much more complex than it seems!My work from this project :-Gamefeel: I spent a lot of time just moving the character around figuring out how it should be, how to have this "Zero Gravity" feel... Because in early tests we would get a lot feedback that it just felt "slipery" instead of not having gravity. I also wanted movements that would benefit players that mastered the ability to anticipate the course of events. When it felt right I did the same for the packages, when we bump into them, throw them etc...-Concept & Gameplay: the first idea we focused on was Overcooked vibes like everyone has "tasks" but everything tries to block them. Then we refined it to what we could call "space Amazon delivery team". We realised that anyone should be able to pick up the game, so there should not be much to "learn" and objectives should be understandable at first glance. That's how we ended up with a basic action that everyone can do, but is very much improvable with practice (gravity) and of course a lot of disruptance (LD ingredients).-Design on Coopetition, Difficulty & Chaos: At one point we asked ourselves if we wanted to have a specific score for each player, we did not want too much going on in the game, we wanted it to be reliant on "teamwork" but we still wanted the possibilty for the players to mess around between themselves. That is why we let them the power to grab each other. We wanted the difficulty to come from the chaos coming at the player which benefit a flexible playstyle more than a role based one. We thought it was enough and there was no need for competition between players.-Rational Design: Thanks to the task asked by the school, we put together a nice RGD sheet that helped us find a lot of levels ideas with variants of gameplay, it was really interesting. Unfortunately the scale of the project did not allow to make them a reality but if we ever continue the project I think we would use it.-Documentation: Obviously I did a lot of document throughout the project, game overviews, creative briefs, flowcharts, RGD, scope poster, one page.-Playtests: I gathered people from our offices, and took their feedback, like I explained earlier it was really useful in order to see if the feelings we wanted to get across were correctly received. Bugs did not occur often in these playtest, we would often find them on our own.