The Lodge (fenrirans)

The Lodge is the result of a school project made in 1 month in a team of 2.

The rules of this exercice were first to prototype a 2D game with only primitives.

We choose to do a versus fighting based on physics. After a first draft of ideas, we found a concept that we thought promising : a triangle arena balanced on it's tip. 

The goal was for each player to make the area fall on one side or the other by engaging in a battle of positioning. The players had to use their own weight and the first test showed an interesting side of the idea : the more the triangle is already tilted, the hardest it is to revert.

We added at that time the ability to throw a ball able to kill momentarily the adversary, letting you to be the only one applying weight for a short time.

Problem at the time was that the two tips of the arena were the center points of the fight, and made positioning quite binary, or forced the players to focus on killing their adversary, which was not our intention.

The solution we tried to overcome this was make the arena rotate, each player having to make it do a full turn either clockwise or counter-clockwise. We applied a pseudo centric gravity, each face "airspace" generating its own gravity so that you could change face.

At that time, the prototype made in javascript with Phaser had a good feeling. The physics were kind of like magnetism, killing the other player gave you a slam, to turn brutally the arena or stop it's rotation.

Going on Shiva engine was quite the challenge, the physics was not behaving in the exact same way. We tried to add a feature to get over those changes : changing face was harder, so we enabled players to teleport to the position of their projectile.

As for the art direction, we wanted the battle to take place in an arena with a reacting public, and the floating triangle inspired us the idea of a ritualistic duel, held in a sorcerers lodge, hence the title. We made the triangle their symbol and designed them with triangular hats and toreador garments. Lack of time forced us to find a design for players' characters to have neither arms nor legs, so we went for mummies-like cloth armors.

We tried to add depth with parallax and camera movements so that the action always takes most of the screen.

What didn't worked as planed :

-Too many mechanics to understand and a too succinct tutorial

-One key to go clockwise, another to go counter-clockwise is hard enough, using joysticks proved unusable. This in itself took some time to understand, even if once learned players gained good control over their character, learning to go right with what is the left key in other games was proved to be difficult. Coupled with the complexity of the other mechanics and of the goal, it made the game very hard to access.

-The changes in physics engine were never completely balanced, making the game less pleasant to use than in the first prototypes.

-Stretch and squash on the little square characters of the prototype, and seeing them roll on the surfaces when landing was one of the best thing of the prototype. Making them into characters standing up killed the beauty it held.

What worked :

-When two players had fun trying to understand the game or were intrigued enough to play a long time, the variety of game dynamics was great. The balance between the players continuously evolved and they taught each other. 

It was a big reward to see players having fun and learning together during playtests, given the arduousness this task could be.

-Fights could be witty and intense, players showed creativity!

-The positioning advantage at the points of the triangle to have the most effect on its movement worked well.

-The arena sometimes getting carried away in one direction offered true moments of tension for the players.

To conclude

It was a very fun project, original and ambitious for us at the time! We made some mistakes that definitely made it hard of access, hard to understand, hard to play. We thought at the time they where solutions while adding those things was not necessary.

We took pleasure in making it, learning from it and watching some players have fun with it.