Frightless Birds
Project description
We were tasked to create a party game perfectly suited to Enversed's new 4-player arcade game console with this design challenge:
Design a party game with minigames and a minigame management system on a flat arcade table to enable people aged 8-50 of any gender in the gaming cafe of Enversed to have fun together as easily as possible, on demand.
Fulfilling this challenge meant that we'd have to focus heavily on making the game as easy to play as we could.
This ease would make the game accessible to anyone who booked an Enversed VR experience, regardless of prior gaming experience, which is important for a game meant to be played in a waiting room.
Context
Enversed primarily provides VR experiences for it's customers but they also provide a small gaming cafe to roam around in while they wait for their experience.
Currently, Enversed is working on expanding the range of activities that people can play while they wait for their experience and one of their expansions was a 4-player arcade game table.
This table was a unique console that they were building themselves and can be seen in one of the pictures below.
We were asked to create a game perfectly suited to the table's setting, controls and purpose to entertain customers while they wait for their main activity.
Results
The primary project result was our game, Frightless Birds.
Frightless birds is a 2-4 player party game where you and up to 3 of your friends can play as flightless birds trying to make your way into flight school. Players play fast paced minigames against each other to score points and eventually earn their place in flight school where they learn how to fly and win the game.
This game was built to be played by people of all ages and skill levels. We accommodated for such a large audience by giving the player a strictly limited number of controls that would be understood in the first few minutes of gameplay. These controls interact with each other in a rock-paper-scissors triangle which creates that super fun player interaction that party games are known for.
During testing, we found that everyone can play and enjoy the game on demand. In most testers, everyone understood the controls on the second game. We also found in all of our tests that the rock-paper-scissors functionality really does create over-the-table social interaction which everyone enjoyed.
Our secondary project results were our minigame framework system and research into what would make our game an easily playable and fun party game.
The minigame framework is a system in unity that one of our programmers designed to make Frightless Birds as scalable as possible. This facilitated the addition and tweaking of minigames easily for future developers.
Our research delved into what makes games easy to play, what makes a party game a party game, what do younger and older audiences like to play and more. From this we were able to get key insights like: no more than 3 controllable mechanics to make the game easy and facilitating social interaction is key. This research served as the foundation of Frightless Birds.
About the project group
We are Sugar Glider Studios, a group with a diverse background, some from software, some from tech and some from media. What we have in common however, is our love for making games.
Due to our diverse knowledge and great vibes we were able to make a well designed, functional and good-looking game that our audience and client were very happy with.
We had a great time working with each other which created a fun atmosphere for us to work in and make a cool game.
