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Mau Lundell
Technical Designer
About:
Party? Party! is a chaotic asymmetrical couch party game with a hectic aura. The 3 sober people trying to hold the best party ever but that one drunk friend wrecks it all.
Details:
Roles:
Gameplay Designer, Blueprint Scripter
Time:
2 weeks, March 2020
Team size:
7 (3 designers, 4 3D artists)
Tools:
Unreal Engine 4, Perforce, Trello, Discord
Workspace:
Both Offline and Online (At Futuregames and with online with communication through Discord)
My Contributions
Gameplay Design
Core Gameplay
Balancing
Level Design
Prototyping
Gameplay Blockout
Gameplay Iteration
Blueprint Scripting
Interaction
Interaction Bars
Gamemode Handler
Animation Blueprint
Gameplay Conception
"Party Party" Concept
The 3 Vs. 1 intense gameplay was created to enforce player cooperation in a couch setting. But to have only 1 ultimate winner by the end we let every player take a turn as the drunk guy.
The short 1-2 minute rounds go by in a flash because of the hectic nature of the game. The rounds are over once the Drunk Guy messes up the party enough.
Keep the party Alive!
The party’s ratings, represented by these bars, can easily go out of control since the Drunk Guy is faster than the Sober People. This was found through testing and we liked how it heightens the intensity of the game which created more fun scenarios.
The winner at the end is the one person who canceled the party the fastest.
Map Layout
The player map was created with one main idea in mind; "Don't let the Sober People camp". We fixed this by giving Drunk Guy things to mess with at every corner of the map.
This enforces communication and coordination between the Sober people. If they aren’t fast to respond to what the Drunk Guy is doing the bars will quickly stack up!
(First Iteration of the map)
Not Enough CHAOS!
But it wasn’t enough to enforce movement for the Sober People. To fix this we added some timed events.
This addition made the game more fun for both parties. Drunk gets more freedom since the Sober people have more things to be occupied by.
Gameplay Coneption
Game System Interactions
Creating a Loop
The core gameplay only consists of Walking around and Pressing the "A" button.
This was made to ensure that the focus of the game would be about the couch co-op element of talking to each other, and also creating more emergent gameplay from simple interactions.
Concept
Drunk messes at Party
Partys rating goes up
Partys rating goes down
Sober cleans mess
Concept
Keeping it Simple
We quickly decided to keep the mechanics as simple as possible so that it would be easy to learn.
The gameplay gets more hectic because of this since Sober can only react to the drunk. This was made to give the Sober people a bigger sense of urgency to fix things.
Game Interaction
Blueprints
During this project I was in charge of the core gameplay blueprinting.
Interaction System:
The interact-functionality was created with modularity in mind. This let me save a lot of time since I could use focus on the design of the interactions.
To ensure fluidity we made it so that players easily can interrupt an interaction by simply walking out of the radius.
Blueprins
Interaction System
Physical Bar:
We created this bar to show the players when an interaction was happening. It shows clearly to the players whenever somethings happening.
physicl bar
Game State Controller:
This function was created to easily check the state of the games different bars. It’s not the most optimized way of doing it but it did the trick with a short time frame.
Game state
What I'm proud of:
Gameplay System
Trying to build a system that would be easy enough to create while also giving depth to gameplay in only 2 weeks was a tough task. But I am very happy with how it turned out and by keeping it simple I feel like we could definitely work on nailing the fantasy of a “Party”-party game.
Blueprints:
This was my first time in charge of the main blueprints of a game in Unreal Engine and I'm proud of the level I achieved with my blueprints in such a short amount of time.
Project Structure
and Teamwork:
We had frequent meetings where we updated everyone on current progress from all members. This gave all the members a good understanding of the progress and made it so that we could easily find problems in the project.
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