Yet another game we tried to inform the design of Torch is Dungeons of Fayte by Brent Ellison. Dungeons of Fayte is a co-op dungeon-crawling RPG sim. It’s multiplayer on one screen (and one keyboard), but content-wise it has a lot in common with our design. This game was recommended to us by an EA employee after they saw the direction our design was taking.

Right away, one of our favorite parts of Dungeons of Fayte was its sense of humor, and we discovered that humor seems to work better with other people around. We could take advantage of that by infusing our game with a quirky sense of humor. Dungeons of Fayte also allows you to try different classes that really change how you play the game, and it’s a bounded experience: When the game begins, you are told that the boss will show up in four months. At the end of four months, the boss shows up, and whether you win or lose the game’s ending is tailored to the choices each player made during the game. It’s a cute idea that really pays off.

Sometimes the gameplay can be frustrating though, whether because swords are missing enemies by a single pixel, or because players keep bumping into each other and making it hard to move around. The game is intentionally unforgiving, with very little healing available (until later in the game) and you only collect gold in dungeons, which seemed a little unsatisfying to us.

Since our game has a very casual audience we decided we should go the opposite direction on several of these gameplay issues. We wanted hitboxes to be forgiving so that swords work the way people expect, and we want the punishment for death to be light, like a party game. Finally, we’ve starting thinking about how we can acknowledge the player’s play style, to help create a nice ending for our own experience.

Screenshot from Dungeons of Fayte launch post here.

Another game we looked at while doing research for Torch was At A Distance by Terry Cavanagh. It’s a two-player, two-screen puzzle game that’s free online and doesn’t take very long to play. The players move around two separate spaces in this game, but they really do have to work together to proceed. Figuring out exactly how they work together is the heart of the experience. Where Artemis was an Information Filtering game, we categorize this as a Divided Information game where each player has a piece of the puzzle and they have to fit them together.

At A Distance isn’t a perfect model for us to follow though. The players solve the puzzle together, but it’s actually hard to communicate verbally about what they are seeing – the designer recommends a set-up with the two screens side-by-side so that both players can see both screens, and this is a very different cooperative experience than the one we are creating. The game also requires some simple 3D platforming which, while not always bad, isn’t ideal for an audience that includes non-gamers. Finally, the instruction-less puzzle experience, while fine for At A Distance, is not the right approach for us. We weren’t even sure when the game ended, and those moments of confusion at the end of the experience are not what we want to leave the press with.

So we came away from this game certain that our design needed a clear beginning with a clear objective, and a clear ending rewarding the player for finishing the experience. We also are leaning more and more toward 2D controls and navigation, which may be easier for our audience to grasp.

Screenshot from At A Distance main site here.

As we prepared to pitch a game idea, our team explored a number of games and experiences that were related to the living-room experience we wanted to create. Here’s one of the games we tried, and what we learned about our project in the process.

Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator lets a group of players pretend they are on a “Star Trek”-like show, each taking a different station on the bridge of a ship. Every player has their own screen with a unique interface, and they share a “mainscreen” as well. There is also a captain role that does not have a screen, but they work with the other players to direct the ship. When we arrived at EA, they asked us to take a look at this experience because in many ways it is like the multi-screen experience we want to create.

Artemis does several things right. First of all it has a strong thematic consistency, maybe because of the show that inspired it. The game has its own language and conventions that players learn to adopt over time, and it can become a very immersive experience. Second, we are fascinated that at its heart Artemis is an information filtering game. Players are genuinely interdependent because, as a group, they receive more information than they can manage. Much of the game involves mentally processing the information you receive, and deciding when and how to surface the important information to the rest of your crew. Finally, the game actually demonstrates the importance of the captain role in a crew scenario. As a conduit for information, the captain becomes the hub of the information-filtering experience, and they enable the team to work as a single entity when it counts.

But Artemis isn’t perfect, and there are several ways in which it is a poor model for an experience targeted at CES. The biggest problem for us is that it’s a hard game to learn. The user interface isn’t great, there’s no tutorial, and the objective isn’t immediately clear… this is the kind of game where you probably turn to a wiki after the first round, and a show floor audience isn’t going to have patience for that. Another problem with Artemis is that some stations are just more fun to play than others, and if you get one you don’t like you are stuck with it for the entire session; not a great demo experience. Third, we weren’t thrilled with how Artemis utilized the main screen. It has a cinematic view, but to be honest there’s not usually much to see there. After a few missions, our crew would usually switch the mainscreen to long range sensors and leave it there. Even worse, when the captain is doing a good job the crew will rarely look at the main screen, because it can be somewhat redundant with their own view. Finally, the fun factor in Artemis can depend a lot on your fellow crew members, and especially on the captain. If your captain is just barking orders and not communicating the plan, the game can feel like work. With only first-time players on the show floor, we don’t want to risk this in our game.

So our biggest takeaways from Artemis are that we need to make the TV impressive and important, and that maybe Artemis’ crew-style multiplayer isn’t the right model for us to pursue for CES. With Torch, you’ll see that we’re taking a different direction.

Artemis logo from the Artemis homepage here.