Multiplayer Madness - Desinging a Game for Up To 4 Players

When I first pulled Wizards off the shelf of old neglected game projects back in August, I had wanted to simply get an existing but not quite finished game of mine onto itch.io. A number of factors made that more difficult than I was expecting, including both design and technical considerations.

Ready Up

Wizards was initially conceived as a multiplayer game in the style of Robotron 2084. Up to four players can join the game and play. Designing the game to provide and adequate fun for any number of players up to four is a significant challenge in itself (and I'm still working on it). What's giving me more of a challenge, however, is designing and setting up how to get 1, 2, 3, OR 4 players into a game together. Additionally, I was trying to keep in mind that I may want to port this game to an arcade cabinet, which affected how I may want to design the relevant systems. There were some of the concepts I needed to consider to make this happen:

• registering that a player wanted to join the game - when a player joins the game they are registered and assigned one of the four wizards - controllers 1-4 are assigned to each of the four Wizards - to keep things simple, each Wizard is hard coded to a specific controller number (1-4)
• designing a multiplayer credit system - there is only one pool of credits - each player that joins the game deducts a credit from the credit pool - again, to keep things simple, I chose to use a single credit pool rather than have credits for each player - tracking multiple credit pools was not something I wanted to tackle for this game
• designing the multiplayer Ready-Up UI - I wanted to keep it simple while maintaining an arcade aesthetic - I took some inspiration from Gauntlet when designing the ready up feedback despite each player not contributing to their own credits pool

Getting this Party Started

With multiplayer games there are some things that may not be initially obvious in the designing process but stand out like a sore thumb during implementation. 

• designing starting positions for multiple unknown Wizards - the starting positions for each Wizard can differ depending on how many players have joined the game - this number can change throughout the game so the system needs to be adaptive - also, depending on what player still has lives affects where they may be positioned at the start of a level
• unregister a  player when they rus out of lives - I decided to give each player their own pool of lives - when a player runs out of lives, they are unregistered and will not spawn again at the start of a level
• designing a score / lives UI - I wanted the players to have an opportunity to both collaborate and compete on score so I included a total score as well as individual scores - I'm not completely satisfied with the results but I'm also constrained by how much real estate I have available to display this info - again I was inspired by the sidebar layout of Gauntlet for the scores and lives display

Where's the Juice?

The game still has a long way to go before I would consider it done. It definitely needs a lot of tweaks, sound effects, music, visual effects, and maybe a few more features. My initial plan was to spend about a month on the game getting it back into a playable state. I've overshot that by about a month (4 months if you could the actual time I started working on it again). I've reached a milestone getting it to be playable to some degree, and while I still want to put more improvements into the game I may move on to another project for a little bit before I come back to Wizards!. Additionally, I want to take a break from multiplayer game for a while and focus on some single player experience instead (I've been working on multiplayer games for a while now). So maybe tune in again in a few months.

Until then, Good Luck & Have Fun!