BrotherEye
A multitasking arcade style game
Product Manager / Gameplay Programmer
Made in C++ with a inhouse engine provided by the college
BrotherEye was a 4 person freshman project that was done over one semester. It was inspired by a flash game on Kongregate I played as a child called multitask. I always liked arcade style games and wanted to make something challenging yet doesn’t take up a lot of time. It was designed to take players between 3-5 minutes on average and compete for high scores. Since it was a full team of programmers, art was not a priority, but we made effort to have a cohesive theme and a consistent UI design.
Theme and feel
At the time, I just watched Spiderman No Way Home and thought of Ned’s excitement of being “the guy in the chair” to spiderman. So I came up with the design of a computer with various screens popping up. The player takes on the role of guiding superheroes through different missions, which are minigames that use different keys. The UI and main menu were all designed to look like a retro desktop, with the icons on the home screen representing the options, start game and tutorials. In addition, the high score screen was designed as a text file.
Each minigame provided a number of points based on how well the player did, while doing too badly in the minigame causes the player to lose a life, after 5 losses, the player loses the game.
A fighting minigame inspired by 1 finger death punch, this is a minigame that players will have to stay focused on, surviving for a set time.
Gameplay
There were about 7 minigames and they were designed to be distinct and spread across the keyboard and mouse to keep players challenged while allowing for up to 4 games happening simultaneously. The design of the games were split into two categories, one where players were required to survive for a specific time, such as a running minigame where players press space to jump over incoming obstacles, and those that players only needed to complete within the time limit, one of them I designed and programmed was a game that required players to find a password, inspired by the fallout hacking minigame. This was to avoid overwhelming the player with too many minigames that required constant attention.
A minigame where you have to input a random sequence of numbers, its on a time limit so better players can leave it to the last seconds
Affixes
I wanted to increase the difficulties without resorting to just increases in speed or reducing the time limits. The solution was different affixes that will appear after a set amount of time, this adds a new mechanic that can appear in the different minigames. The double click affix for example, introduces new enemies and obstacles that require more button presses, breaking up the flow that the player has built the past minute.
My experience as product manager
Seeing my game idea come to life was a great joy, although it was painful at times, having to cut features and planned minigames for scope and time. I did ABC buckets to sort out our priorities, having a few set minigames that had to be finished, with a list of “would be nice to add” games and features.
I split our gameplay programmers to work on a minigame each, using systems one of us built for common elements like collision or movement. This divided workload ensured that no programmer would be stuck waiting on another to continue their work. This also meant that we could assign harder minigames to more confident programmers. Weekly check ins ensured that everyone was kept updated of each others progress, and help can be assigned if needed. We also had meetings where each member would suggest a feature or minigame they would love to see in the final product.