Team-based – Tobias Makes Games

Ritual Breaker: A GGJ Game For Four Druids And Two Traitors

Tobias Wehrum — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 22:30:13 +0000

It’s been a few years since the GGJ whose theme was “deception” – a theme that we, back then, utterly and completely ignored. The only way to make up for that (I assume) is to use the theme in another GGJ! So here, after 6 years, my honor as a jammer is finally restored. I proudly present our game:

Six druids have come together to perform
the yearly Super Important Ritual.
But unbeknownst to them, two traitors
have infiltrated their ranks!

Complete the rituals, but watch out for
those which fail – and who participated!

Watch your fellow players!
Identify the traitors!
(Potentially) Save the world!

A deceptive platforming game for four druids
and two traitors with XBox360 Controllers.

GGJ Page with Windows build

https://youtu.be/OKODoR44e1I

Ritual Breaker (Global Game Jam 2016) (https://youtu.be/OKODoR44e1I)

Credits:

Elise Terranova: Art, Game Design, Hat Design
Heiko Weible: Programming, Game Design
Tobias Wehrum: Programming, Game Design, Sound Design

Used assets:

Evil Laugh by The Baron
“The Snow Queen” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

This GGJ was a lot of fun and for once, I was actually happy with our core concept right from the beginning! After the initial idea from Heiko, we settled really fast on the rough plan: Some sort of single screen game where each of 6-8 players controls an avatar and accomplishes tasks with the other players. There should be a lot going on, so while the traitors try to sabotage the game, everybody should be already distracted – and even when somebody fails to do something, it might be because of difficulty instead of because of them being a traitor.

Of course, the development wasn’t such a smooth ride. Like every jam, phases where it went really well and phases where I felt like the game was going nowhere alternated. I particularly remember the first night right before sleep when I frantically wrote down seemingly brilliant ideas for how the game will not only work, but be perfect – and then the next day, when I implemented one of the ideas, only to find out that it and all of the other ideas were flawed and I had no idea how to fix it.

I suppose it’s obvious to anyone who ever tried it, but: It’s surprisingly hard to make a good traitor game! The game has to be interesting for two asynchronous sides, there is a lot of hidden information going on and both sides need meaningful actions. And ideally, every action should also help to identify who the traitors are or allow the traitors to obfuscate their identity.

In the end, after a lot of testing (thanks to all our enthusiastic testers!) and iterations, we arrived at the current concept: Six players, two of them traitors who don’t know each other, but know that they are a traitor. Then a series of three-player-rituals pops up, and players can go into them and “complete” them by pressing the A button – or fail them by pressing the B button if they are traitors. If 11 rituals are completed successfully, the players win. If 9 rituals fail, the traitors win. And if the time runs out before either happens, the players win if they can identify both traitors.

While the game offers a bit of strategy for the traitors (e.g. they can decide how long to play “good” and wait until the other traitor failed some rituals; blame somebody else for a failed ritual; wait until there are lots of rituals which only their participation needed and then fail them all), they might still struggle to successfully deceive the players because the wrong rituals spawn or they feel like they don’t have any good options. The ritual-spawning balancing was something we couldn’t properly balance before our time ran out.

In the end though, while it is a bit flawed, I am proud of the game we made there and I definitely had a good time at the GGJ 2016! Thanks a lot to the organizers, our relentless testers and my fellow team members Elise and Heiko for being such a joy to work with! And thanks to Wooga for letting us stay at their great offices here in Berlin.

PS: Here is a screenshot and a few slides that Elise made to explain the game:

Gamestorm X Body Play Jam

Tobias Wehrum — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 15:02:07 +0000

A few months ago, I’ve been to the Gamestorm X Body Play Jam – a game jam about making physical games which use the players’ bodies as the central element. And what a jam it was! The ideas were flowing, and our team of four (comprised of Xanto, Juri, Nina and me) didn’t just finish with one, but two working games. To round the event off, the other games were incredibly fun to play as well and in the end I left exhausted from moving around so much, but satisfied.

Before I present the games, here is an awesome impression video from the jam. A huge thanks to the Gamestorm team for their filming and editing work!

Our first game: Dance it off!

The development of our first game started of really smooth: Juri suggested a dancing game (“I know nothing about dancing, but…”) where you get some kind of behaviour instructions and have to find your partner. After thinking of the board game Inkognito and pondering how to make partners identify themselves and what should happen if somebody wrongly thinks they found their partner, the game shifted a bit from “stealth/bluffing while finding the one partner” to just straight out “party”: Everybody gets 3 dance styles/moves (like “tango”, “picking apples” and “Michael Jackson”) and has to find their three partners as quickly as possible. The first one who achieves that wins the game!

Apart from a few hang-ups, the game worked really well. The only problem I can see is when one of the partners doesn’t know how a certain dance style looks like. This could be fixed by having a game master whose sole job is it to explain dance moves.

Developing this game teaches me once more not to give up too early. This is not a game we could test in our group of four, so I suggested we try to think in another direction instead (which resulted in the second game, so no regrets here!), but when we later had people to test it with, it turns out that it worked pretty much out of the box! The biggest thanks goes to Nina here – while we were pondering some details for the second game, she used the opportunity to playtest this one with the organizers and she singlehandedly created dozens of dance style cards.

Our second game: Slurp!

Again after a suggestion by Juri (“I know nothing about biology, but…”), our second game was roughly based on the idea of cells absorbing other cells.

At least 8 players are formed into two teams, and in each team, players are paired up. The two players in each pair hold hands, thereby forming a small circle – and then they try to enclose enemy players in it, either by throwing their arms over an enemy player or by briefly letting go of their hands and then closing them again around an opponent.

Once you caught somebody, you yell “Slurp!” and the caught enemy has to let go of their partner and stay inside your circle where they can try to hinder you by being uncooperative when moving. Caught players can be freed again when one of the enclosing players is slurped.

When one team has caught a certain amount of enemies at the same time, they win!

The rules are sometimes slightly confusing to execute in the heat of the battle and it’s not always clear who caught who first, but the ensuing chaos was still a lot of fun.

Cupcake Puppeteers

Apart from us, there were two other groups. The first one made Cupcake Pupeeteers, an improv game where players are paired into puppets and puppeteers. The puppeteers are given a scenario (for example “Hogwarts”) and characters (Harry Potter, Voldemort etc.). Then they have to play the scenario out by moving their puppets – and the puppets have to guess in which scenario they are.

It was a bit hard to direct puppets bigger than you and I feel like the game would be better with commonplace scenarios (like “in the kitchen” or “at a shop”) instead of pop culture scenarios which needed specific knowledge, but overall it was quite enjoyable for either party – “masterfully” directing somebody else on one side and trying to deduce what the heck your movements are supposed to be on the other.

YOGAme

And here comes my favourite of the evening made by yet another group: A “yoga game” with a master teacher that has transcended so far that they can freely levitate, while the players have to try to imitate the teacher as closely as possible with the help of assistants.

To make this game possible, the teacher is actually lying on the floor. They are filmed by a camera and projected on a wall to make it seem like the teacher is upright instead of lying down.

While the teacher is striking poses and the players strive to get as close as possible, a helper is going around and appoints players who are not doing well to be assistants. Those assistants help players who are still in the game. And that’s desperately needed, especially once the teacher begins “levitating”.

The last player who is still in the game wins and is the teacher for the next round.

I can’t even begin to describe how much fun this game was! The concept itself is already funny, the strange moves of the teacher quickly become absurdly hilarious and even when I dropped out and became an assistant it was equally enjoyable and satisfying to help other players. My favourite part was when the teacher gently levitated of the “floor” and started swimming – first up, and then sideways and down, a point in the game where the assistants had to work as hard as the remaining players.

All in all, this was an incredibly enjoyable Saturday and I’m really glad I participated! Thanks a lot to my team, to the organizers and the other participants!

Chronic the Hedgehog, An Urban Game About Persuading Strangers On Escalators

Tobias Wehrum — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 17:05:58 +0000

I’m currently taking part in a Concordia summer program called “Critical Hit” in Montreal, Canada. It’s about making games – and, more specifically, about making experimental games using wearables. The first week was more about getting to know each other, getting several workshops (among others for using Pebble and Muse) and playing urban games with each other before the actual jamming is going to start.

I did make one game this week though: Chronic the Hedgehog, an Urban Game on escalators about persuading strangers, made in about 1 hour together with Jessica Blanchet, Grayson Earle and Titouan Millet.

(Video taken by Jessica Rose Marcotte)

The game is played with two teams, two escalators, two cups, a dice per team member and a lot of unsuspecting strangers.

One team starts at the upper position, the other one at the lower position. I will explain the game from the lower team perspective – the other team just does the same mirrored.

To prepare the game, the lower team places a cup in front of the downstream escalator. Then each team member takes a dice and they queue in front of the upstream escalator.

Once the game starts, the first team member steps on the upstream escalator. They cannot move their feet – they have to stand on it until they reach the top. In the meantime, they try to get a stranger on the parallel downstream escalator to take their dice and put it in the cup on the botton of the downstream escalator. If they succeed, this team member is done. If they don’t, they have to take the downstream escalator to go down again and queue for another try.

Once your team member reaches the top, the next queued team member can start.

The goal is to be the first team which has all their dice in their cup.

And yeah, that’s the game. It was a bit chaotic, but pretty fun.

If you want to read more about the first week, take a look at the recap post on the Critical Hit website!

PS: Here’s a picture to appease the preview thumbnail generation gods of Social Media.

Backstabbing & Betrayal

Tobias Wehrum — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:10:41 +0000

This week, I was at the wonderful Indie Connect. At the end was a game jam, and that’s where I started the following game for the theme “Treason”:

Arena fights are dangerous.

But at least you can trust your partner, right? Right?

To be on the safe side though, you took
some Vampiric Throwing Knives with you.
The arena rules prohibit the use
of weapons against your opponents,
but there is no mention that you
can’t use any if your partner acts up…

Collect power orbs to boost your antigravity!
Shove your opponents off the platform!

Win as a team or alone.

After all, if YOU kill your friend,
at least their power is safe with you, isn’t it?

Play it in the web player!

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

Credits:

Programming: Tobias Wehrum
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Sound: Moritz Ufer, Vegemyte
Fonts: Nate Piekos and GemFonts 98

Monster Pit: Team Building As Seen By A Mad Scientist (for up to 8 players)

Tobias Wehrum — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:30:34 +0000

Next jam! The plan was to make a little game and spent the remaining time with a university assignment like a responsible person. Then “Dark Science” was chosen as a theme, so I was like “I got to get my priorities straight” and concentrated solely on making this little gem:

Monster Pit

In the current economy, teamwork is all!

The mad scientist’s way to find the best monster for the
job is (obviously) to chain two of them together and throw
them in a pit with fireballs and other monsters.

Each of you is one of these monsters.
Work together and win as a team!

The winner will be used for further experiments.
Good… luck, I guess?

Play it in the web player!

Download it for Windows/Mac/Linux!

Credits:

Programming: Tobias Wehrum
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Fonts: Nate Piekos and GemFonts 98

Sneakball: A Fast-Paced Action Game about Stealing – for 4 Players on 2 Gamepads

Tobias Wehrum — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 02:14:42 +0000

Another month, another Berlin Mini Game Jam. I’ll post the result from the November one later, but for now – here’s the game for the December edition for the theme “stealing things”:

Sneakball

Pick up data packets. Protect them from your enemies.
Route them to your base. Steal the ones the enemies have.
Sabotage their routing paths. And most of all: Be swift.

Sneakball is played in 2 teams of 2 players each – and each team only has one gamepad, with one stick for each character. Coordination is key, and the game is more strategic than it looks like at first glance. You can pick up the white data packets by colliding with them. If you pick one up, it’ll have your color for a second and is immune from being stolen before it turns white again. Let the balls touch your satellites (the two things emerging from the base) to score.

Downloads:

Windows Executable
Source (Python 2.7, pygame 1.9.1, pybox2d 2.1)

Credits:

Concept and Programming: Me
Art: Michael Kessler
Music: Kevin MacLeod
Sound: Moritz Ufer
Antigrav Font: Nate Piekos

Alchemist’s Duel: An arcadey puzzle game for 2 two-people teams

Tobias Wehrum — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 08:00:26 +0000

“Alchemy” was the theme for the May Mini Game Jam, so I made a game about alchemists trying to reproduce a certain formula and their faithful henchman collecting ingredients for them:

Alchemist’s Duel

You are right before finishing your Magnus Opus!
Only one recipe left… Same goes for your rival though.
Send out your collector to get you the ingredients you need,
and be the first to finish your glorious work!

Play here, directly in your browser!

To finish, you have to fill your goal field with the right elements:

The three light blue, the yellow and the green elements are at the right place. The dark blue shouldn’t be there in the red goal field. Three fields are still unfilled. Push the blue element out, and fill all the goal fields with the right colors to win!