Making more people happy

It’s always better if a game could be played with more people. Super Smash Bros. is successful because of that, and with the recent launching of Super Smash Bros., 8 players could duke it out on the arena. Which inspired us to put more than 2 players in the game. The problem here is how to implement it.

For our programmers, it’s of course feasible to implement a sort of lobby and room system that supports more than 2, maybe 4 to 8 players in the same map. However, our group members pointed out that having more players will likely results in an even faster game.

Not that it’s a bad thing.

However, we are not casual games, we don’t have a hi-score board either. Since there are no sources to get points. Leaderboards can surely be implemented using the “Most rounds survived” as standard and it’s surely a good incentive for players to compare among themselves.

The shorter game times are actually a good thing here because the players can rack up in points very quick since a match will likely ends in shorter than 5 minutes with 8 players eagerly killing each other. A Team Battle Mode can be similarity implemented to promote teamwork and lessen the pace.

The point of making more people playing the game is that for a game with a single goal and very fast pacing, more people playing means there are more random factors (without us throwing random factors built-in the game here or there.) since people will tend to have different strategies. Which will provide a random factor of unpredictability in the process. In other words, having more players will increase the re playability of our game which is always a good thing to look forward to.

Of course, add in multi player functions require us to focus more about the balancing of the game play, but thanks to the simple goal and game play mechanics, this won’t be hard to do.