DIVE PARTY

Developed for the Jam-O-Drum controller, "Dive Party" is a cooperative game where four players, each with a specialized role work together to navigate, illuminate, collect treasure, and defend against enemies before time runs out. Project Timeline: 2 weeks

Check it out on Itch!

Ready up screen:

Layout of the projected game view on physical table.

Player UI:

Wheel:

Button:

Stops the ship in place (cancels the auto drive)

Wheel:

UI for the Jam-O-Drum

No players ready

Button:

All players ready

Once the game starts the UI adapts to each role. The Jam-O-Drum positions players in four corners around a central screen. This layout made concepting UI a bit of a challenge. The solution we came up with was giving each player their own UI menu overlying each of their controllers. Placing UI on their controllers not only let us show them exactly what their buttons did, but also afforded us more space within the central screen where most of the gameplay would take place.

Captain

Steers the ship using an arrow indicator

Magnet

Button:

Rotates a magnet around the ship

When held down it attracts money toward the ship

Cannoneer

Wheel:

Used to aim the cannon

Fires a cannonball

Torch

Wheel:

Button:

Rotates a flashlight around the ship

Stuns enemies but puts the light on cooldown

Before the game begins we introduce the roles to each player. Once they are ready they press down on their center button and their respective role icon lights up confirming their ready status.

Mini Map (Captains View)

In order to help the captain navigate easier as well as sell the underwater theme we changed the games tint to get more blue and purple as you descend in depth. To go along with this the levels Map color also changes.

Tiles

Roadblocks

During the game the orange dot (representing the ship) moves around the map to show the Captain where they are along with where the boss is (the pink squid icon)

In order to work efficiently we created a set of reusable tiles and decorations. Having a nondescript set of tiles let us arrange and iterate on our our level designs much faster helping us to test out as many layouts as we could within our short timeframe.

Metal objects that the Magnet can interact with.

Coin that drops on fish kill

Fish

Common fish swim around the map and group into a schools based on distance. They also reward players with a small reward on kill.

Players each select a letter of the teams name then lock it in using their buttons.

Ending Screen UI and Leaderboard

At the end of our game we thought it would be fun to emulate an old school arcade cabinet letting players enter a 4 letter team name. We also thought that since our game is a test to cooperating with your team it would be fun to have each player be responsible for one letter within the teams name. Once players have chosen a team name they can then view the leaderboard of the top 5 teams and top 3 scores.

GameDemo

Nina Gamboni: 2D Artist, UI Emily Zhang: 2D Artist and Animator Malaya Heflin: Programmer, Producer Junren (Jimmy) Jian: Programmer Courtney Singleton: Sound Designer, Producer

Created using Photoshop, Procreate, Spine, and Unity.