Meta Mixup
Overview
Meta Mixup is a 2-player co-op puzzle game that challenges expectations. One player sees the ‘front’ of the screen (on the left), while the other sees the ‘back’ (on the right). Their goal is to work together to start the game. But along the way, unexpected things start happening on the desktop, in the loading screen and in the menu.
My contributions
I worked on this project as a designer and a developer. I worked on the concept of the two players on both sides of the screen. Then I helped create the puzzles and design the course of the game. I also worked on the coding for most of the puzzles.
Date/Period:
feb 2024 – mar 2024
Project type:
Student project
Tools I used:
Unity
Github
Team:
Louiza der Kevorkian | Chairman & Artist & Designer
Jelt Stellingwerf | Artist & Designer
Renee van de Kamp | Designer & Developer
Result
Game trailer:
Elaboration
The game is meant to encourage players to look at certain things with an alternative view. We do this by challenging standards in and expectations around video games, so that players are surprised and encouraged to think out-of-the-box.
The players sit opposite of each other and each have their own screen. One of the players sees the screen from the front, as a ‘regular’ player, and the other player sees the screen from the back, as a ‘developer’. Both players see different components and are able to interact with the game differently. This makes the players dependent on each other, needing to communicate about what they see, think and do, in order to progress the game.
Process
Context / Goals
This was a school project of which the assignment was to create a game for the open day that would give potential future students a better idea of what the studies that HKU Games offers entail.
From our own experience, students at HKU are taught a new mindset rather than hard skills. Thinking out-of-the-box and sometimes even ‘childishly simple’, together with expecting the unexpected, is encouraged during the study, and we wanted to convey that in our game. Communication is also an important skill for the program, so we wanted to reflect this in the game as well. Since we wanted people to experiment, think out-of-the-box and communicate, we decided that a ‘co-op puzzle game’ would be a good option.
Our target audience consisted of visitors of the open day at HKU Games. Through a survey we determined that the vast majority of these people have at least some experience with gaming, with most having a lot of experience. This meant that they already had expectations of what a game was, which in turn meant we were able to play with those.
Concepting
When designing the gameplay, we looked at the standards of design in most video games, gave them a twist and worked them into a kind of problem or puzzle.
For example, a screen with a loading bar with blocks indicating the loading progress, something that is normally nothing more than just that, is turned into a platformer. Although the screen seems normal at first, the loading bar will eventually get stuck. Only when the ‘regular player’ is out of patience and starts clicking the screen, all bars from the loading bar, the player’s mouse and several buttons fall down to the bottom of the screen. The mouse now only moves left and right on the bottom, and will jump when the player clicks. The ‘developer’ can drag the bars across the screen, creating a parkour for the player to jump on.
We wanted to really catch the players off-guard to immediately put them in the right mindset, which is why we decided to start off the game with a fake version of the Windows desktop, making it seem like we had not yet started up the game. When the regular player moves their mouse towards the game icon, it jumps to a different place on the screen, making it unclickable. Only when the developer holds the button is the regular player able to click it.
After we worked out several puzzle ideas, we connected them together into a cohesive and, as much as possible within the concept, coherent game. We played around with the difficulty of the puzzles quite a lot, as we wanted the game to be challenging, but afterwards have players feel like the solutions are almost stupidly simple.