Many of the users on this site likely recognize Nick Puleo as our former managing editor/Co-Optimus founder. A few may also recognize him as one of the two gentlemen, the other being Dave Paul, behind Brain Shape Games. This month in Indie-Ana Co-Op, Nick and Dave give breakdown for us how they went about developing the co-op for SCHAR: Blue Shield Alliance, which recently saw its Steam debut.
Nick's Thoughts
Video games have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The high I get from playing a great game is only rivaled by the high I get from creating something. So it’s no surprise that I combined those two passions into game development. When I was 11 years old I started creating text adventure games in QBasic and shortly after started developing twin stick shooters in Visual Basic. But I was never alone on that journey, whatever content I created as a kid I created with my friend Dave. I’ve lost count of how many comics, movies, video games, and other media we created together, and it wouldn’t shock anyone that knows us that 25 years later we legitimized our childhood hobby and released a “real” game to the public.
SCHAR: Blue Shield Alliance was our first attempt to try the whole game development thing for real. It seemed like the perfect time now as Indie games legitimized themselves in our industry as great values for your dollar and a passion filled product. When I started Co-Optimus in 2008, I did so because of the co-op experiences I had playing games with Dave, marathon sessions of Gears of War in co-op reminded me of the days of Streets of Rage and Golden Axe on the Sega Genesis. I knew this was a genre of gaming that had a following and needed a community.
When we scoped out BSA I knew I had to put my love for cooperative gaming in it. Over the years I’ve learned a few things on Co-Optimus as to just what makes a good co-op game.
Everyone needs to have an equal role in the story or gameplay experience The abilities of each player or character should complement each other, so one character’s deficiency can be overcome by another player’s strength All players should be rewarded equally for their success Players should be able to help other players when they fail, overcoming disproportionate odds to have a greater feeling of success The game needs to have those “silly fun” moments that make a great story laterWe initially released SCHAR: Blue Shield Alliance on Xbox Live Indie Games and PC in 2012. It never took off like I had hoped. We had poured countless hours of lives over nine months all while working day jobs. This was our game and every jab at its quality or shortcoming stung deeply. I poured a lot of my own money into the game as well but things looked quite grim as to whether or not I’d even make it back. The indie scene had become crowded and muddied and we struggled to get noticed.
After two years, we were Greenlit; a glitch in the system perhaps. But it gave us new hope for the game - a fresh start. So we cracked open the source code and re-examined things. Looking at those key things above, I think we nailed everyone of them. But perhaps in doing so, we left some single player folks hanging a little too much. Our first order of business was to integrate the pieces of Steam we love - stats, achievements, leaderboards and other Steamworks features. With a user base that rivals the consoles, we knew we had an opportunity to get the game in front of more people.
Along with adding the Steam features we tweaked levels, fixed bugs, and removed some nagging issues. We even updated some graphical effects, added more PC centric features, and optimized when we could. While we had a long term plan with the game for adding content and features, we felt we wanted to get the game in the hands of players sooner to gather some feedback - so once again we released.
The Steamworks setup afforded us an interesting look into the game, with leaderboards separated by the number of players we saw our couch co-op game wasn’t being played all that much in co-op. In fact about 1 in 6 players had actually played two player co-op, and almost nobody has played three player co-op. Four player couch co-op? Not a single person yet.
The lack of online co-op hurts us for a PC game, the vocal couch co-op audience tends to be more console oriented. I’m sure there are a myriad of other factors that contribute to the lack of players on PC that are actually enjoying couch co-op play, but hopefully we can find a way to connect with that audience. I’m confident what we’ve built through our little space shooter is something that will reward every player.
Dave's Thoughts
For me the end product wasn't as important as the process of creating something, although having some concrete goals helped keep things on track. It was exciting to be able to make progress quickly, to have the flexibility to do things the way that we wanted, and to immediately see results. It was the most fun I've had writing code for a long time (probably since the last time we made a game).
I think game design is definitely the hardest part of creating a game. The tools and libraries available these days make implementation fairly straightforward (while still interesting). Figuring out what do to is much more difficult, and is of course is just about the only thing that matters in the end.
We'd like to thank Nick and Dave for taking the time to provide us with their thoughts on the game. SCHAR: Blue Shield Alliance is currently available on Steam for $4.99. They are also running a contest until March 29, 2015 where you can get your name in the game; details here.