Post Partum for Supernatural Sleepover - lm2745/Supernatural_Sleepover_Final GitHub Wiki

Made by Fay, Mila, Samir, and Andy for Game Development Studio in Fall 2015.

The way we interpreted the prompt of a ‘party game’ was as a game that could be both competitive and fun, and easy to jump in and play without needing to sit through a long tutorial or mastering the control scheme. The reason for this is because many parties typically have a crowded and chaotic atmosphere with plenty of different activities to do, and thus a lot of prospective players might become disinterested in “Supernatural Sleepover” if they had to spend a good amount of their time learning how to play the game. After deciding that our game should have intuitive controls and be easy to pick up and play, we needed to choose the genre. Since a single-player game would not make much sense to play at a party, we determined that a multiplayer game with which people could compete against their friends with would be the best idea. We also came to the conclusion that the game should be playable in short bursts, so that everyone would be able to have a turn. For this reason, we quickly determined that a fighting game would be a well-suited genre for developing a party game.

From there, we needed to decide upon several technicalities: who the characters should be modeled after, whether it should be 1 vs. 1 or 2 vs. 2, and how the fight would end. We decided upon a sillier theme for the characters, along with a cartoon-inspired aesthetic for the game UI, in order for “Supernatural Sleepover” to appear fun and endearing. Not only would this attract players, it would also make the fights seem less ‘personal’ and have a lesser chance at destroying any friendships at the party. Secondly, we decided that by having 2 vs. 2 matches, more people could play the game at a time and have the option of using teamwork, so the game would have both the cooperative and competitive elements that are important for any party game. Lastly, we needed to decide on whether the win condition should be whichever team reached a certain amount of points the quickest, or whether it should be whichever team lowered the opposing team’s health the quickest. After choosing the latter, we needed to experiment on how much health each character should have, so that the battles would not be too easily won, but also wouldn’t drag. There was also the question of whether the fight should end if one teammate dies, or if both needed to be knocked out in order for the opposing team to win.

After testing this, we determined that the game would end too quickly if players won upon defeating a single opponent, and programmed the game so that both members of a team needed to be defeated to achieve victory. After we had agreed on these rules, we came up with ways for each character to feel as though they had a different playstyle. Santa Claus, for example, is the slowest character, but he can hit the hardest. Conversely, the Easter Bunny’s damage is low, but he has the highest agility to compensate for this. Later on, we added special effects for each character – for example, the Tooth Fairy can turn herself invisible and Cupid can float to avoid obstacles. By doing this, players can experiment with different playstyles and feel as though each character is varied.

3 things that went right

• Didn't overscope
• Came to a consensus about how we wanted each part of the game
• Played to everyone's strengths

3 things that went wrong

• Github complications
• Underestimated how big a task file integration was
• Lazy code to get things working for playtesting that just stuck and wasn't fixed for a long time