Daquan Griffith
Project Type : Game Jam
Date : Global Game Jam 2025 Jan 24 - Jan 26
Role : Designer and Programmer
Team Size : 6
Global Game Jam : Bubble Theme
Coming up with a Co-op arcade shooter in 3 days
Design & Development Breakdown
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Concept & Goals: To create an arcade game that forces players to work with each other while reinforcing replayable enjoyment within 3 days
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Core Mechanics:
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Movement: Players can only move on a half circle around the middle of the map
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Design Rationale: Forces the other players to make up for each other's respective blind spots
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Programming Highlights: Developed a more niche movement pattern that restricts the player
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Shooting: Players can shoot projectiles however enemies must be hit with both projectiles at some point to do "damage"
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Design Rationale: Forces players to coordinate shots, in other words, they may not have to shoot the same enemies at the same time but they need to split focus and strategize together
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Programming Highlights: Just a simple fun status system and bullet property script
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Score and Combo: Instead of death getting hit with both player projectiles bubbles the enemy, while bubbled if a player projectile hits the enemy it will bounce in a direction gaining speed and a combo multiplier. Once a bubbled enemy touches a player it will be defeated giving points based on the combo multiplier.
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Design Rationale: Rewards fast precision and incentivizes risky rewards
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Programming Highlights: Simple enemy behavior, enemy states and math scripts
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Overall Progress
Initial idea
Early on there was a big question of what the two players would look like in their formation
How would you not only enforce Co-op play and behavior in gameplay but in design visuals and layout ?
Idea 1
Having both players on only the sides of the screen felt a bit boring and this idea assumed that enemies spawned only on the top and bottom of the screen.
This formation leads to less feedback when the player moves since it just up and down leading to moments where the player would feel like getting hit is not their fault
Idea 2
Having players defend a corner was more interesting and sparked the idea of omnidirectional aiming
Still, this option leads to even less player movement flexibility since the move track is shorter and contained
This also opened up a weird blindspot between players that would feel very bad if it ever happened to the players
Final Idea
Having the players in a semi-circle sparked the most interesting ideas and felt good to implement
It allowed players to not only cover each other's blindspots but their own in the worst-case scenario, if they were fast enough
Finalization
In the end, it was just a matter of adding basic enemies and a nice little redical to show where the player was aiming
Some enemies shoot while others charge straight at you
We did having an interesting boss implemented that was made of all enemies that you can find in the game but he sadly did not make it in time
In the end, it was fun seeing people find a friend to play this game and I would like to thank all the people that voted this game as a crowd favorite