About the game

Two Man Horse is a goofy and fun twinstick shooter made by a small team of five people striving in the art of game developement at Digital Arts and Entertainment in Belgium. 

Our two characters are called to a local birthdayparty in a park to entertain the kids but what they dont know is that the kids are in an uncontrollable state of a sugar rush and our characters' horse costume looks oddly similiar to a sweet and tasty pinata. Defend yourself and complete objectives to escape the park and survive the kid onlsaught.

While fighting through the park you need some ways to defend youself against the enemies and refresh yourself when in need of a kid break. To achieve this we have some items for you.

Weapons and Distractions

We have our trusty candy gun and some cakes acting as a distraction to satisfy the gluttonous kids.

Pickups

For a quick refresh we have our shrooms as a speedboost and apples to replenish your health.

The kids in our game are not friendly but sugar rushed kids that come straight at you to bully and attack you. Here they are.

From left to right we have: The normal kid, the fast kid and the ranged kid.

To escape the local park you need to complete our objectives and reach the gate.

We started with different pitches to get some ideas for what kind of game we wanted to make. Obviously we liked the idea for "Two Man Horse" the best and decided on that pitch. Here is our fist version.

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!

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.

To start off the project we prototyped the game to get a feeling of the range of things we wanted to do and how fun it actually is to play. The final prototype looked somewhat like this.

To start off the production of the game we spend a good time on planning everything out. We used HackNPlan to plan our work.

After a lot of planning we designed the first enemy and our character.

We thought our prototype was a solid base so tried to recreate that feeling with a better quality comparable to the production phase.

After getting the first designs down we began implementing animations.

The first level design of our park mapping out the geometry and the location of our landmarks.

To make the map feel alive we implemented the objectives we planned to do.

To release this game wanted to put a good amount of time to polish player feedback, appearance and iron out bugs.

We added post proccessing, refined the ground surface and implemented a transparency system for the player to see the character at all times.

The objectives are more intuitive with new icons and markers.

Closing words

At the end of this adventure we as a tream are proud of what achieved together and the game we made. We want to thank our leads and the DAE for guiding us throught this experience and are eager to invite everyone to try out this small game we made. We hope you have fun!