Piers Bishop

Context

This was the final project of my school year, a three-weeks-long project (like Super Giant Robots), for which the imposed theme was "Post City" (alongside "Post Human" and "Post Media" for additionnal ideas).

This was also my first group project for the year. A few of my classmates wanted to work on a videogame project rather than pre-rendered animation, so they decided to come to me and we ended up forming a five-person group for the project.

Gameplay

Although the gameplay is quite simple and intuitive once you get to it, it really is rather complicated to explain at first, so I'll try and make it simple.

There are 32 characters roaming on a map, divided into two teams of 16. Each player has a screen which is divided into 16 views (4 by 4), with each view corresponding to the first-person view of one of the characters of his team. 15 of these characters are automatically controlled : walking around, pausing every now and then, etc... And one is controlled by the player. The goal of the game is to get rid of the character controlled by the other player.

Once the player has figured out which sub-screen he's controlling, he has two possible actions : Kill, and Swap.

• Kill is pretty straightforward. If the player is close enough to a member of the opposing team, pressing this button will get rid of him. The aim is to kill the character that's controlled by the opponent, but if you miss, the corresponding sub-screen on the opponent's screen will turn black as the character is killed. On the other hand, killing the wrong character will also freeze your current character for a short, but consequent, amount of time.

• Swap allows the player to swap bodies with another member of his team (also within distace). When the button is pressed, the player's current sub-screen will  proceed to being automatically controlled, and he has to figure out on which new sub-screen he is controlling. This may seem like a bad idea at first, but...

There are several elements of gameplay that come into account when killing an opponent player. The first, as mentionned, is the freeze time. But the amount of time the player stays frozen increases with each kill ! Swapping bodies will "reset" this timer, in the sense that the timer is linked to the body and not the player. If the player were to swap with this body later on, he would again have to deal with excessive freeze times.

But there are also two drones circling around the city : one per team. Each drone will follow the last body of the team to have killed a person. Meaning that not only will going on a killing streak handicap you more and more, but also make you quite visible to the other player and, more importantly, trackable. Swapping bodies will remedy this problem, since the old body will be the one followed by the drone (until the player kills again).

So each player  has to use the tools given him to track the other player, or try and stress him into having an erratic (and noticeable) behaviour by killing most of the members of his team (these creeping black screens are quite oppressive). Or try and stay low, observing not only his playable screen, but also the views of his other characters, to try and notice something that could lead him onto his opponent.