2 For 1 Level Special

One of our goals for the game has always been to create an interdependent cooperative experience, meaning that each player needs the other’s help to achieve goals. We achieved this with our system of platforming and line drawing, but encountered a problem along the way: To get both players to the end of the stage, you often end up executing the same procedure twice. We tried out a few things to break up the experience and ultimately came to the conclusion that every level basically needed to have two distinct paths through. It’s sort of like taking two levels and smashing them into the same play-space, and it can get a little messy.

ShadowLevel

The green platforms are only solid to the green player, the blue platforms are only solid to the blue player. The dotted lines show the way through for each player.

We’ve come up with some tricks to get everything into the space tactfully. A few examples are physically dividing the level into two sections, switches that change the level as you progress, and ‘shadow blocks’ that only one player can touch (shown left). However; I worry that if we don’t have enough different methods the levels will start to get stale.

I suspect that our best tool in this endeavor is going to be subtlety. If we can use a single, well placed, ‘shadow block’ or switch to alter the paths that players want to take instead of forcing them to opposite sides of the level, we’re going to be a lot better off.