This month in Indie-Ana Co-Op, we hear from Devil's Dare developer Secret Base about how to balance a game for multiple players. Devil's Dare is a four player beat 'em up that takes may of its cues from the arcade games of yore. Raymond Teo, lead developer at Secret Base, takes us through his process of adjusting a game for a co-op experience.
THE UNEXPECTED PROBLEMS OF DEVELOPING A MULTIPLAYER GAME
When it comes to making a multiplayer game, the common misconception seems to be that it is as simple as adding another player and increasing the enemies’ attack power. We knew going into Devil’s Dare that wasn't the case, so we went in with caution. Despite that, some things still caught us off guard.
For any developers out there that are looking to develop your own multiplayer game, here are a few of the not so obvious problems we encountered, and our solution when working on Devil's Dare.
Problem 1 : Unexpected Behavior
One of the thing we went for in our combat was clarity. As much as we can, every monster's attack has a start up animation, giving the player time to react to it. Players can take some time to understand a monster's action before moving in.
But when there are more than two players, you can start to see that players feel empowered, bold, or even reckless. They no longer have patience for notes and signs, and they will charge towards anything that moves. They don't intend to observe because if they hesitate, their friend will charge up instead and they'll lose the fun and action.
Our solution to this was not to just add more monsters, but more varieties of monsters; spawning in from different places in the multiplayer mode. Now with more monsters, players feel less inclined to fight the guy that their friends are already engaging. With more varieties, players are forced to not just button smash, but instead identify with whom they're fighting. And lastly, with the monsters coming in from different sides of the screen, they are forced/lured to move around.
All in all, the more players there are, the more balanced the team is, which makes them way more effective, much bolder and, hence, more reckless. Adding damage helps, but if you add too much, it feels cheap. So in the end, I felt what we did was better, by giving players the opportunity to make mistakes, break up formations, and not get back fast enough to help a teammate.
Problem 2: Different Expectation
Another thing we realized was that people's expectation of the game was different based on the number of players in the game. In single player mode, people were okay with dying and retrying. They would take a different path, or try out a different character altogether and learn which one works best for them. A tough boss fight was a fun challenge. It made them more determined to perform.
On the other hand, when you have multiplayer mode, everyone is hyped up in the company of their friends. Everything is funnier to them, they're more easily excited, but they also get bored so much faster. When they die, they're less likely to take a different route, and they are more inclined to stick with the same character. So in the end, we set the game to have what we call a “dynamic difficulty.” This doesn't mean the game gets harder with more players, but more of the fact that we provide a different difficulty curve based on the number of players.
In a single player game, we make the game a little harder. We imagine the scenario that the player has just bought the game. It is fresh and he's ready to take a good look at it. Since he's playing it alone, he's tends to move around more carefully to learn and explore. He's more willing to accept the difficulty, dying and retrying every 15 minutes, and not making big progress for a while.
But in a local multiplayer game, players gather his friends that finally found the time to hang out. They're chatting, laughing, drinking and, in short, they are less likely to take the game too seriously. So we set the game to be easier so they can have a good time.
Problem 3: Playtesting
The last problem is actually the most practical one. Like any indies, we usually spend a lot of the time playtesting our own game, or, as and when necessary, we get families and friends to try them, too.
In a multiplayer game, that's so much harder. Within the team, if we were to play test the multiplayer mode, everyone has to stop working to play the game so things get interrupted. Getting your friends to play was fine for a while, but eventually, people got bored or busy. It’s also really hard for a bunch of working adults to come in at the same time.
We were very lucky, though, as our office is actually based in the Games Solution Center (GSC), an incubation studio founded by the Media Development Authority(MDA) of Singapore and managed by Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP). On top of that, we're only 15 minutes away from Singapore Polytechnic and Digipen of Singapore.
Digipen, of course, is very games focused, but both NYP and SP also feature games development diploma courses. We took turns and arranged with the different schools to host a playtesting session every once in a while. In return, we spent a bit of time talking to the students and answered some questions they had about the industry, or just games development in general. I'd like to think that it benefited both side, as the students get to learn about actual development, and we get to play test our game.
Closing Thoughts: The Wrong Arcade Experience
When we look back on the arcade days, most of the problems previously outlined didn’t exist. Most beat'em ups were made for the arcade and if it was a little on the hard side for the single player, it was sort of okay. You threw in a few more quarters and you're up and running again. If you really wanted to, you’d get a few friends to help you out. At the end of the day, the difficulty was defined by how much money you had, and that's really not the kind of arcade experience we want to deliver here.
As much as we like to glamorise the arcade days, there were good and bad parts to them. Beat'em ups weren't meant to be a direct port, and we should avoid blindly replicating them.
Devil's Dare is coming out on the 21st October 2014, so if you're interested in checking it out, be sure to head over to Steam and put the game into your wishlist right now!