Let players join/leave as they please!

When we were initially brainstorming for the jam, we were all tickled by the idea of controlling laser eye-beams with the analog sticks: each stick would independently control one laser blasting eye. Once the sticks are involved, it’s easy to add more players: just add more eyes! At some point we started talking about leaving all the eyes on screen, but closed, and allowing players to join the game whenever they want. On top of this, we made the number of enemies that spawn in each wave increase proportional to the number of active players so that the game remains challenging with more players (in truth, it is probably a little too challenging).

I really like this concept! I’ve taken to calling it “fluid local multiplayer” and have been thinking about it quite a lot since. I’m not convinced that it really does anything for our game, but I think there are some situations in which fluid local multiplayer might be really really cool.

It doesn’t really work for our game

The reason I suspect this system doesn’t add anything to our game is because a sessions of It Came from the Rift is short and discrete. The round has a clear beginning and end, and there isn’t really enough time for players to need to pick up or put down controllers. It is a fun little trick that I find aesthetically pleasing, but it is a little out of place. One thing it does is eliminate the need for a “join” screen, where players do something inane like choosing a colour or pressing ‘A’, but I much prefer the way Samurai Gunn solved this.

It could enhance long running games

I think fluid local multiplayer might make a big difference in longer running games, like Crawl, Risk, Game of Thrones (the board game), or the upcoming Moon Hunters by kitfox. These sorts of games often require players to join together, play through the entire session, and then end the game together. In some cases, like Risk, players can be eliminated during the game and then must spend the rest of the afternoon eating Cheetos (this is the worst). How many times have you been playing a long running board game and been like “ugh, I have to go for dinner”. If those games were built with concessions for fluid local multiplayer, someone leaving early (or arriving late) wouldn’t be a problem. I kind of look forward to trying to make a game like this: it seems like it would be an interesting design challenge.

Another situation where I can see fluid local multiplayer being cool would be when you show a game at a convention, festival, or meet-up. At events like this, you have players wandering in and out of your magic circle, and they won’t always want to wait for the next round to begin. If a 3-player round has already started, and that 4th arrives, they might not stick around to wait for the current game to finish. This is kind of a special case of the long running game problem: all games are “long-running” when there is a line-up.

What might a fluid local multiplayer game look like?

I don’t doubt that this already exists in some form in some games. I can’t imagine an example just now, but I’m sure they are out there. It would be cool to see a game tailored around the fluid local multiplayer dynamic. Right now I’m hacking on something like a match-3 puzzle: players guide blocks down a puzzle column and match chains of the same colour to earn points. Since fluid local multiplayer has been on my mind, I started imagining a tournament game mode in which players try to “dethrone” the current player. Something like,

• One player starts with the crown, and can earn points by breaking blocks
• There are as many puzzle columns as there are active players
• Players who join can try to steal the crown by dropping blocks on the leading player
• When you eliminate an opponent, you steal their crown and can start earning points

This rule-set has problems, but something similar might be a really fun party game. In my imagination, new puzzle columns come smashing onto the screen, pushing existing columns aside. I can imagine a couch of six players, with the controllers being passed around as each player in turn tries to dethrone the current king of blocks before they earn too many points.