Intracranial Symphony
ROLE | GAME DESIGNER & UNITY ENGINEER DURATION | 48 HOURS TOOLS USED | UNITY, C#
Intracranial Symphony is a local-cooperation 2d platformer game. Two players are two minds in the little girl's spirit world. All their movements and actions will be applied to the movement and the actions of that little girl. The players’ goal is to move three of them to the end of the level.
This project was created for the Fall 2022 Art Center Game Jam. The game jam's theme and our primary design constraint were "1 + 1 = 3" and the project was awarded the winner of the Best Theme Award.
How we interpret the theme
With the design constraint and theme of "better together" in mind, our team come up with the ideation: people are driven by different ideas. When two ideas work together, people can get new insight.
Then we start to polish this idea in both game mechanics and narrative aspects.
GAME mechanic
super jump and speed run
Accelerated running is when players move to the left or right at the same time, the little girl will automatically move to the left or right at a faster speed. When the little girl encounters the fragile floor, the two players need to do accelerated running to let the little girl walk across it before the floor breaks.
In order to enrich the game experience and the potential of the level design, we design three kinds of actions that players need to cooperate with. And we design three corresponding levels to let players learn and apply those three mechanics.
1: Accelerated running and super jump | 2: Grabbing the handle in the air to move | 3: Kick the other player
CONTROL GUIDE:
Accelerated Running
Super jump is when the players jump at the same time, the little girl can jump higher than usual. When the little girl encounters a high barrier that cannot be passed by ordinary jumping, two players need to jump at the same time to allow the little girl to pass the barrier with the super jump
Super Jump
Grabbing the handle to move in the air
There will be yellow handles on the players’ map and pink rods on the little girl’s map. When one of the players holds the handle, that player will not be able to move, and at the same time, the little girl will get the ability to move through the rob in the air. Then the other player needs to cooperate and use his move to control the little girl on the rob to move. It allows the little girl to pass through the trap on the ground.
This action needs a higher level of cooperation because players need to watch the position of three characters more carefully, and cautiously decide to grab the handle and release the handle at the right time.
kicking
Players can stand beside the teammate and kick the teammate to the position in front of them. When players need to reach some position that they can't jump to, they can kick their teammates over. Or when players need to move to a certain location, but their movement will make the little girl walk into the trap, players need to kick one of them over, the kicked player in the air does not affect the movement of the little girl, so players can protect the safety of the little girl while reaching the position they want.
This is a more puzzle-based mechanic, which increases interactivity between the two players and also requires players to think more carefully about their strategies.
Grabbing the Handle
kicking another player
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
My contribution to Intracranial Symphony is designing the game mechanic of super jumping and strategic kicking, making the quick prototype, developing all the mechanics in Unity, and refining the game after people playtesting it.
It was a very rewarding experience of designing a game. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this abstract theme come out in an interesting and understandable form, and I also gained a lot of insight into how to emphasize the cooperation of two people when designing a two-player game.