Hello, for my dissertation I am researching how co operative play can be used to help people with soft skills etc.
My question is, I need to make a simple game that involves two people to play.
I am a programmer and not an artist, so can someone please give me a good simple game design where I can achieve co op play.
I have two usb controllers, a leap motion, 4 android phones/ tablets at arsenal.
Would appreciate if any game designers can throw me an idea or two. Arigato!
Hi I tried playing, it looks fun, but is playable as a single player game.
how complicated do you want it, what age group & must it be co-op in the sense that you must have at least 2 players?
I did a simple shmup at school last year for an assignment then came home & modified it to have 2 ships on screen. The player fuel counts down as well as decreasing with each shot fired, & they also have shields that take damage from enemy bullets or collisions with the enemies or asteroids that float down screen. When they shoot the aliens shield regeneration cells are randomly dropped that need to be collected, shot asteroids drop raw fuel (fuel regen). In my one it was a competition to see who could last the longest but you could just record the score as the time they both survived. This should encourage them to co-operate & share the regen items so that they can last longer as a team.
I just thought of a variant or extra mechanic. You could make each player shoot the enemy ship to destroy it. When it is shot it changes colour, the colour maps to the player that still has to shoot it. If this was the sole thing you could just remake space invaders with 2 players below the shield then make both of them have to shoot the alien to kill it. Speed of the aliens may need to be tweaked to ensure there is time to shoot each of them twice.
What genre? Give them a goal, give them ways to work together to accomplish that goal, and give them LOTS of great feedback. Then stop - it may be all u need.
@tedthebug gave a great example of making an idea COOP. Best tip - keep it simple!!!
Gigi
Now see this reminds me of the kind of creativity found in old school games. Simple and effective. Well done @tedthebug ! This kind of stuff is also the reason I don’t agree with the “ideas are worthless” line of thinking. Yes an idea has to be implemented as best as you can but first you need something to implement. And while ideas may be “a dime a dozen” great ideas are much less common and is a big reason why we see so much of the same kind of things over and over again.
Agree - Ideas aren’t worthless - good ideas are priceless.
The inexperienced game designer “I’m the idea guy” and need a team to create my idea and bring my grand idea to life - - those are worthless. 
Hmm, depends what you mean by a great idea. If you mean an idea that’d make a very fun/interesting game, no, ideas still seem worthless to me, and great ideas seem easy.
If you mean a very fun/interesting game that is also VERY simple to make, yeh I think theres still some worth. Still very little though.
I guess I don’t see how you can view ideas as worthless. For me ideas are what start everything, guide the design and implementation of everything, provide the way to improve everything and so forth. Without the ideas there is nothing to make in the first place. Without further ideas there is nothing improved.
Also I think many people find it very easy to get ideas of games to make, ideas for what to put into the game, ideas for how to implement things in a great way… and they don’t seem to realize there are a lot of people who find that very hard. A simple search on the Internet will show a lot of people looking for inspiration, asking how to get ideas for games (and other things) and looking for other such things.
Heck, even right here on these forums we can find the same things. I just did a simple search for “game ideas” and found these on just the first few pages of results and one was just posted today:
Many of these people are saying they just are trying to come up with an idea of something (anything) to make with Unity period.
It is not limited to games. In any creative work people often run into this sort of thing. For example writer’s block is a pretty well known case.
What happens after the idea? It is true that ideas have value, that some ideas are better than others, and that great ideas are rare. It is also true that without execution, an idea is just a passing thought - it will be lost to the ether, as millions before it. Without execution, an idea has minimal value.
In addition, even a great idea is usually only partially right - it needs evolution, testing, refinement. It is the combination of amazing execution, and deliberate iteration, that brings the wisp of an idea into reality. And, since execution + iteration are 99.99% of the effort, the simplest way to make the point is to say that ideas are “worth” - “LESS”.
Gigi
Cat and mouse games are always simple and fun.
I agree with that. Especially on great ideas being a process and execution being the key. Well, I have said before that, of course, a great idea that is never executed has no value to anyone. Still though I just cannot see it as ideas have no value. Execution of the idea is critical and even then great execution will need some solid ideas driving it. Not just the skills of the developer but the ideas they have for how to execute it. It is often in that difference of how that we find the main differences between a great game and a poor game. And it was the better idea that drove the how.
There might also be a difference in the levels of ideas between what some of you and myself are looking at. For a birds eye view idea like “I’m going to make a great shmup that is different from the others being released these days” that is a pretty much worthless idea. There is nothing to it. If I expand that to “I am gonna make a great shmup that features more interaction and enemy AI than other shmups generally have” that is a little better. It at least provides a direction, a focus. Beyond that I am looking at all of the details. When it comes time to add that interaction what are the various ways to do it? The ideas I come up with may be better than what some would come up with and worse than what others come up with. Even if I execute my ideas flawlessly I am still limited by the boundaries of those ideas. Only if I get a better idea during that process can I improve upon it compared to the person who had a better idea to begin with.
Personally, Ideas have value as they provide the starting point but once the project has started the idea loses comparative value as the other stages ramp up. As those stages start to decline then (hopefully) a new idea arrives to kick the upward trajectory off again. The true value of each idea is dependent where it appears on the rollercoaster graph of development & the combined result of the end product.
That is basically how it is for me. I suppose there could be a difference in how some people develop too.
For me it basically goes like this:
I get a base idea. Just a basic concept of something to make.
Then I take that concept and work it kind of exploring the potential in my mind expanding the original idea into a more detailed bigger idea. I might actually jot down some stuff on paper or make a few doodles.
Then I do a little experiment just knocking out a little prototype. If I like it I will keep exploring that moving forward. If not, I stop and think about it for a while to come up with more ideas to try out. How can I make this work? What would make it fun? What would be a better way of executing this idea? Or what would be a better idea to completely replace the other idea with? Just more and more ideas. And it just kind of keeps going like that.
So for me at least ideas are a very integral part of the whole process. Everything I am doing is driven by one or more ideas. Idea for the concept. Expanding that into a bigger idea. Ideas for specific things to add. Ideas for how to execute other ideas. Basically hand-in-hand: Idea. Execute. Idea. Execute. So… just as an idea without execution has no value (unless someone else wants to execute it) similarly execution does not exist in a vacuum and requires one or more ideas (mine or someone else’s) otherwise there is nothing to execute.
I use mind maps to do a brain dump, linking bits as I think of it, cross linking etc like a stream of consciousness dump then go back & check it as a whole to see if it actually does hang together. Then I put it away & get back to working on something simple that I might have the skills to do
Mind Maps are awesome. I often use those as well. Sometimes just freehand on paper and other times using FreeMind on the laptop.