Herman Pettersson

Aspiring Gameplay- And Systems Designer

Hydro Flippers

An Extreme-Sports game made for mobile with Simulated Simultaneous Multiplayer.

I was Design lead & Gameplay designer for this project but also helped with various other things such as implementing the character animations.

  • Real-time Gameplay

  • Players take turns to play

  • One Phone

  • Each player affects the gameplay of the other

This group project had a set of requirements, as given to us by the school. It had to be an extreme sports theme, it needed to be a mobile game and it needed some form of multiplayer component.None of our programmers in the group had any experience doing online coding and with 5 weeks in total it was out of our scope to do anything with online multiplayer.We ended up with a design reminiscent of car games in time trial mode where you can see a "ghost" of the best time and race against it. But in our case, the "ghost" was the movements of player 1 that drives a boat, which in turn determines the route that player 2 can follow.This turned out to be a very complicated thing to do in practice with a majority of the lead programmers and my time being spent on trying to make it work.We managed to get it into a working state by the time of our presentation, but we would need to re-do the entire system if we were to keep working on the project.The reason for it is because it is a system built on 3 different actors, all of which have different math algorithms to determine their movement speed. This makes it incredibly hard to make them move at the same speed and make the simulated "ghost" of player 1's movement match that of the actual player.We also wanted there to be a form of strategy & opportunity to mess with each other as players, depending on how the game is played.

What we came up with is a system of challenge and reward. As the boat player goes through the level and drives through checkpoints, they receive points. When player 2 starts playing, the checkpoints are now replaced with ramps. If the ramps are used by player 2, they turn into obstacles for both players for the rest of the game.Although there is nothing from this project that I can proclaim as my own work because we worked very closely with one another in order to overcome all of our difficulties, I am very proud of the end result.