Mutualism was made for my bachelor’s project at KADK in 2019. The context of it being a school project allowed me to experiment as much as I wanted, so I went all in with focus on using alternative controllers as an element for complimenting social gameplay. All design and development was made by myself. The music was made by Jonas Gustafson.
The game is a hack-n-slash for 2 players. It uses a combination of traditional controllers and alternative controllers, the latter being the action of physically holding holds with the other player. You play as 2 colorful blobs who just got married, and together you must protect your wedding cake from being eaten by hordes of hungry enemy blobs. Holding hands will combine your characters into one stronger, but slower, character, better equipped for defeating certain enemies.
The game will be available for free in the near future!
Accomplishments
The project was very successful and resulted in top grades and submissions of the project to IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2020 and IndieCade 2020. The submission to CoG was accepted. It consisted of an academic article created by my project tutor Alessandro Canossa. For the submission to IndieCade I created a short game trailer, shortly presenting the game and its background. Watch the trailer below.
Players utilising the holding hands-mechanic while playing Mutualism.
This game was made for my first year exam project on my bachelor at KADK. The game is a parody of Super Mario and Duck Hunt. It’s a 2-player game where one plays as “the plumber” and the other as the “hunter”. The plumber must escape by collecting keys and exiting though a door. Meanwhile, the hunter has to shoot and hit the plumber 3 times in order to win. The game was made by me and an artist.
Stage 1 gameplay
This is a project I am quite proud of, as I did most of the work and the game turned out very successful and seemed very popular those who tried it.
My responsibilities:
Game design
Level design
Unity setup and programming
Music
Sound effects
Character design
Animation
Running playtests
The background and the other assets were made by the artist.
Stage selection screen
Level design
I designed four levels for the game. I attempted to make each one have their own feel, which is why each layout is very different. The diffuculty is also mixed, as some levels are easier for the platformer, and others for the shooter.
Stage 1 Based on observations, the first level seems to be the most balanced, as it’s very different which player wins the match. One of my important observations is that it seems easier for the platformer, when he/she has the opportunity to progress through the level by jumping to multiple different platforms. In the first level, the platformer can choose to jump down at the bottom lane if he/she feels pressured. However, the level is a one-way only, making it easy for the shooter to anticipate the platformer’s moves. There is a slight delay between the shooter firing, to the shot landing, which makes anticipaition an important stategy. See the level above.
Stage 2 The second level was an attempt to give the platformer more opportunities to escape, by clustering platforms closer. However, the section with the key is very narrow, and makes it easy for the shooter to land successful shots. Because of this, the shooter has a higher success rate on this level. See below.
Stage 2 gameplay
Stage 3 This was an attempt at something very different. As I mentioned, giving the platformer more options for where he/she can to go, makes it harder for the shooter to anticipate his/hers moves. The platformer has a lot of freedom for this in this level, which is why I made it harder by adding multiple keys – The platformer has to get all of them in order to escape through the door. This makes this level fairly balanced, though still a bit easier for the platformer, as he/she can move around very freely and fast. The marked area is where the shooter most often lands successful shots. It is slightly similar to the narrow section in stage 2.
Stage 3
Stage 4 Stage four is meant to be the pro-stage. It is aimed at gamers who are used to playing platformers, as it is much harder to land on the platforms. The shooter has a higher success rate in the level. The level also includes a walljump section along with two required keys.
Stage 4
The music
The music was made to also fit the paroday, and is inspired by the original Super Mario soundtrack. The instruments all resemble the 8-bit sound. The track was made both in a high-tempo gameplay version and a slower lobby version, for selecting stage and breaks in between matches.
On my second year of my batchelor, I worked on a project for Rigshospitalet (the main hospital of Copenhagen). We worked in groups to design games that could provide safe and social experiences for the patients and their guests. The hospital needed a way of improving the visiting experiences, so it would become more social and positive, since many people have negative emotions associated with the rooms and spaces in the hospital.
My group designed the game “Hyggesokker”. Hyggesokker was a collection of four couch multiplayer games, two of which got made. Our design aimed to bring “hygge” into the hospital’s visiting areas. The games are made to be playable for all ages and levels of gaming experience – Much like most family friendly board games, which we kept in mind during the design process. The game should be played using player’s personal devices (like phones), so no one would have to be forced to use conventional gaming controllers, if they weren’t comfortable to do so.
My responsibilities:
Game design
Setup in Unity
Programming (C#)
Sound effects
Content design (questions for prompts, words for Kakao Kop)
Animation
Running playtests
The games
The two almost-finished games in Hyggesokker are called “Kakao Kop” and “Falsk Faktum”.
Kakao Kop is co-op game based on the classic hang-man game, where players have to guess a word within a category. As hang-man obviously have associations to death, the theme of the game was changed to keep a nice and calm mood. The narrative is, that players have to keep a cup of nice hot cocoa full, without spilling anything. Each wrong guess for a letter will spill the cocoa, so the goal is to have as much cocoa left at the end of the round.
Kakao Kop
Falsk Faktum is a quiz game about tricking other players. The game is divided into turns, each with a prompt/question within a selected category. The goal is for each player to get the highest amount of points. Before guessing, every player gets to come up with their own possible answer to the prompt. Then, everyone has to try to find the correct answer. You receive point if either you guess for the correct answer, or if someone guesses for your “fake” answer.
Falsk Faktum
For more information and a downloadable prototype (for PC or Android), visit https://erikandersen.itch.io/hyggesokker. Please note that we didn’t have time to finish the intended controller system. Kakao Kop is playable, but Falsk Faktum is not playable as intended, however it works best on Android if you want to try.
A prototype made on the second year of my bachelor. The game was made as an exercise in working with restrictions. The resctrictions for this was was to make a non-violent team based multiplayer game. My group also decided to mix together all of our ideas on the theme, which was dogs, dinosaurs and pirates. The result is as can be seen, a sea battle between a ship manned by dogs against a ship manned by dinosaurs. Whether it is violent or not is up to you to decide. There is no direct attacking or blood, but you do have to sink the other team’s ship (pretty much resulting in drowning them).
Gameplay
I worked with three artists and was the only programmer, meaning I did not do any art or animation but worked only with Unity.
My responsibilities:
Game design
Setup and programming in Unity
Sound effects
Running playtests
We have decided to go back to work on the game and hope to have a playable version by the end of 2020.
