Two Man Horse
The dream is born
Intro
We are a small group of game developers studying at Digital Arts and Entertainment Howest in Belgium. We are partaking our local GameJam this year and we set out to create an amazing couch co-op game to play with your friends!
Below you can see our first version of our BETA tech document:
The technical document for Two Man Horse describes all the features and mechanics that will be implemented in the final product. This document serves the purpose of giving the team a technical approach to developing Two Man Horse and document it.
Summary
Two Man Horse is a janky and fun top down zombie shooter, but with a twist; You are stuck in silly two-man horse costume.
On a Halloween night, the protagonist and his friend go to a party dressed as two-man horse costume. The night goes on as a terrible fate happens; People start to turn into zombies. The protagonist and friend try to get out of their costume, but the zipper is stuck! Deal with it, get a weapon and bash some zombies!
OR
The two friends attend a kids party in a horse costume to entertain the little chaps, however little did they know that the sugar crazed wild little kids are waiting for the pinata bashing to start! So seeing the largest pinata out of all, the giant horse, they throw themselves in a mad sugar fueled frenzy to bash it to pieces. Must have candy!
This game is all about cooperating with your friend in a very close personal space. Find weapons, kill zombies and use your costume to the best for your advantage to defeat the zombie onslaught.
Prototyping
The first big question mark about this game for us was making the character movement and the rubber banding between the both horse parts fun. So we started with making prototypes for the rubberbanding.
The first version:
Our first try at rubberbanding was a straight forward link between the two horse parts. Its a simple distance calculation and applying a velocity towards the direction of the other part. Nothing special yet, but hey it is something.
It already feels rubber like and gives the feeling we envisioned. The big problem, there is no collision what so ever. We need a better version to actually have a mesh inbetween.
The second version:
In the second version we thought about some simple ways of achieving collision. Our idea was pathfinding. let unity handle the pathfinding for us, calculate the magnitude of the path and apply the same velocity from version one only in the direction of the last corner of the path.
This is actually a great solution for a more or less minimal effort. The problems this time; the unity pathfinding will calculate a new optimal path if you pass by smaller walls or pillars.
The third version:
This version actually reuses the calculations of version one just iterated through multiple rigid objects. More or less like an actual skeleton or rope.
Quite a good result as a early prototype. It still cripples the movement a bit because of the balls having collision, but it now creates a rope that actually interacts with walls of all sizes. Because of the spheres having collision there are actually already fun mechanics possible like dragging objects with your mid piece.
Thats all the prototyping for the first week, we already started a combat prototype but we will elaborate on that and show it in next weeks blogpost!
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.