Defend Your Friend
A truly cooperative game developed for PC & PS4
Design lead, level designer, concept designer
(2015 - 2017) Frenemies & NHTV

Fact sheet

Title: Defend Your Friend
Platforms: PC, PS4, Mac
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Genre: Co-operative puzzler
Time: November 2015 - 2017 
Team: Frenemies
(7 - 13 members at a time)
Awards / recognition:
White nights conference - nominated Indie Game Cup 2017
Indievelopment - Best game in show 2016
NHTV - Best design Y2 block A&B
NHTV - Best design Y2 block C&D
Successfully went through Steam greenlight

Description

​Defend Your Friend is a truly co-operative puzzle game. Both players are not just important, but vital - each with a unique role to fulfill.

Through working together, combining their abilities and having each other's back players make their way through carefully crafted puzzles. Getting to understand the inner workings of their environment, and hopefully venturing off to freedom.
​
With its accessible controls it is easy to pick up for new players, and is perfect for introducing people to gaming!
Relevant sites:
Defendyourfriend.com    http://defendyourfriend.com/ 
Greenlight page              http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=687418441
Facebook page               ​https://www.facebook.com/defendyourfriend/

My contribution

Creation initial concept
Together with a fellow designer I wanted to make a game about co-operation where two players truly depended on each other. One player having a shield was an early decision. I added the idea of the beam to it, as well as a lot of puzzle mechanics such as doors that can be pushed and lasers that can be reflected.
As we were deciding on the controls, we put a lot of emphasis on the accessibility for inexperienced players or people with a disability. We did this by making the vital input as easy as we could: players only need to operate the two joysticks on a controller.
Concept art I made to visualize the gameplay     
The first document I wrote describing what the players and environmental mechanics could do
Design lead (team management)
As design lead I ensured myself and the other designers (ranging from 1 to 3 in development) were always on the same page regarding the project by communicating a lot and reviewing each other's work (as well as creating prototypes and documenting decisions). I also made sure we communicated everything with the programmers and artists in order to make a consistent game.
Prototyping & system design
I came up with a lot of the mechanics for Defend Your Friend, and made prototypes in Unity (as I was more familiar to the program at the time) to test out game play, seeing how well certain mechanics worked and to already start testing metrics and puzzles. These prototypes helped a lot by ensuring everyone has the same game in mind, by proving it's fun, and by already allowing us to test out our levels. You can find these early prototypes on google drive by clicking here.
Very early prototype testing with one character
Early prototype already showing very similar gameplay to what we eventually created
Level / puzzle design & whiteboxing
I created most of the levels in DYF. I would initially draw out a lot small puzzles on paper whenever I had a good idea, then draw those out digitally into a complete level, paying close attention to introducing puzzle elements and keeping every level interesting. After having iterated on that a couple of times I would make whiteboxes. In the beginning of development I made those whiteboxes in Maya, later on I made them in Unreal Engine directly. 
Some of the many notes and drawings of levels for DYF I made
Drawn out version of most of the levels
Drawn out version of level 3
Level 3 whitebox in Maya
Level 3 whitebox in Unreal
Event scripting
Throughout this project I got used to Blueprinting in Unreal, and I used that to create a number of scripted events as well as an actual boss battle.
One of many functions I created to control the boss
The Blueprint actually managing the boss its behaviour
Playtesting
After the second unity prototype I started testing DYF with people outside our team. At first mainly people closely related: including my parents, sister, best friend and girlfriend. Later I, together with other team members, started actively testing at open days from our school, 'play days' we had at the end of each block, conventions we went to and playtesting days we organized ourselves. The information we obtained from this was invaluable to determine whether what we were doing worked, and helped us improve the game a lot. It specifically helped me to iterate on my levels based on what I saw during playtests.
My parents and our chubby cat playtesting one of my early Unity prototypes
Playtesting and showcasing Defend Your Friend at an open day