Game page link
Game Concept
The theme for this game jam was masks, for this we decided to take inspiration from ancient Greek comedy and tragedy masks as the basis of the idea for our game.
This game is a 2-player cooperative game in which all the main actors for this play are sick and you have to play their roles in their place. The problem is, there are more roles then actors. Not knowing the script in advance you have to run around in the backstage between peaking at the script to know what happens next and picking up a costume to go and deliver the appropriate line on the correct part of the stage.
The crowd has a happiness meter and the more mistakes you make and time that passes the more displeased they get. You loose the game if it reaches 0, but whenever you deliver a line correctly they will be a bit happier and the meter will fill up slightly.
My Role
For this project I was the team’s main game and level designer. The interesting challenges that I encountered were tweaking some small rules to adjust the difficulty. For example, having to determine what happens once the script is opened. It would be too easy if you could just have the script open on the screen all the time, so we made it so it covered most of the backstage making it harder to navigate. The person reading the script cannot move from that spot while reading it, and finally, actors are not able to recite a line while the script is open. I thought that these constraints were enough to make the game challenging, while still making it accessible. From our internal playtesting we felt like we reached an enjoyable spot that balanced difficulty and fairness quite well.
All throughout the design process, I kept in mind the idea of chaos as is a main element in what makes this game fun.
