Dev. Stories #1: The Beginning

Hi Stranger!

Welcome to the Development Stories.

If you’re here, you’re probably aware that Coopy Race is a three-player marathon game on a procedurally generated level. What you may or may not have noticed is that Coopy has sort of a whimsical (close to odd) art direction and, if you did, you’re probably curious to understand why...

Well, starting from the beginning, Coopy Race was born from an Exquisite Corpse experiment where the developers blended three platform games to create something exquisite (?).

One of the games was a doodle-ish western-themed platformer with lots of cactus, a Chrome T-Rex, and a charming shooter ghost. The other had a bit-fluffy bunny that battled enemies across the bit-valley to get a pot full of bit-carrots at the end of the road. Fianlly, the third game had a cute octopus with high jumps who didn’t appreciate stars.

We (devs) identified the strengths and weaknesses in our games, then decided to blend certain elements and make something new. For instance, we keep Bunny’s procedural level, as it would generate more replayability. We also decided to keep the star obstacles from the Jellyfish world and the shooting-your-way-mood from the ghost playability. 

Once we were done picking elements and placing them in a single project, we had a little Frankenstein <3

But here’s the spoiler: Frankensteins are no good in the game development world. Especially when the goal and mood of each individual game are different. Therefore we had to reframe our theme and restructure the goal. In the end, we went for a collaborative game since we judge that to be the most fun idea (for both developing and playing perspectives).

We had to cut the loose ends and make some tweaks by adding new features and removing others. To name a few:

• Changing the characters' skills to create an asymmetric gameplay
• Finding a language that fits the new game
• Finding the fun/Making it fun
• Cleaning the interface

Some of those items we only figure out after lots of playtesting and hearing external opinions. We also had some technical issues in between cleaning each of our codes and setting a game manager; although the most difficult part was finding the fun, something we only got right in the very end. But don't worry! We will dive deeper into these details in our next post.