Dev Blog #4 - Cooperation vs. Competition
Hello there Space Cadets, and welcome! This week on the dev blog, we’re going to talk about how you design a game to foster cooperative play, but first, a bit of housekeeping. We’re still recruiting modders to build the first wave of maps, costumes, weapons, and more for The Anacrusis. We also need more people for our weekly observed play tests. You can help shape the game by signing up either on Discord or using this handy form.
We often say that we designed The Anacrusis to be cooperative from the start, but we haven’t really talked about what that actually means. If you recall from our first post, one of our studio’s core goals is to make games that are about players working together. That’s the lens through which we make every design decision. When someone comes up with a new feature, we build a prototype and test it, both internally and externally, to see how it works in practice.
As an example, our first version of the perk system was a big hit with most testers. Players loved being able to choose meaningful, fun upgrades that add different twists to each run of the game. But, the perks created a competition problem. In our first version of the perk system, we placed them in the world like health or weapon drops. That worked great for the players who like to play out in the front of the pack--they always got the best perks. But it encouraged unfortunate loot goblining tendencies of some players, instead of sharing perks with their teammates, they’d hoover them all up for themselves. It was less compelling for the players who tend to trail the group. Instead of the vaunted Explode-y Headshots perk, they got everyone else’s unwanted castoffs, if they were lucky. Perks were a good feature, but they encouraged competition between players. How did we fix them?
Matter Compilers turn a moment of excitement for one player into a thrilling co-op moment for all four players.
Enter, the Matter Compiler. Instead of letting the Driver place random upgrades in the world, now we spawn a single item called the Matter Compiler. Each player can use each Matter Compiler, or MC for short, one time. When they do, the Matter Compiler lets them choose one new perk from a set of two or three potential upgrades. Instead of furtive players grabbing all the loot, a moment of excitement for one player and disappointment for everyone else, finding a matter compiler gives all the players something to be excited about.
As a general rule, we try not to make players compete for resources. Weapon drops are a perfect example—we never want someone to see a primary weapon and not be able to replace the one they’re already carrying. Most weapons you find in the world are infinite spawns, meaning as many players can pick them up as want that gun. Again, this fosters cooperation, and encourages players to use the ping system, which we designed to make it simple for players to share information in the game, even if they aren’t using voice. When a player pings a gun, a marker pops up on the HUD and their in-game character plays a voice line that gives the other players even more information about the drop.
There are exceptions to every rule. We build a handful of weapons that are so staggeringly powerful they’d break the game if we let everyone have them (fear not, we’ll tell you more about them in an upcoming post). We give players so many grenades that they’re effectively unlimited even though the individual pickups are discret. And we do some good, weird stuff with health kits to encourage even more cooperating.
Instead of distributing health evenly amongst players as pickups, but we use a couple of tricks to encourage players to distribute health amongst the team. It feels great to help a teammate, so we make it easy for players to heal other players. When you’re holding a health scanner, left-click heals you while right-click will heal the player you’re facing. But there’s another layer. Our experience making Left 4 Dead taught us something interesting. The longer a player holds on to a healing item, the more likely they are to use it on a teammate instead of themselves.
How do you encourage a player to not heal themselves when they are injured? It took a few tries, but eventually we landed on a perfect solution. We made healing items restore a percentage of the HP the player is missing instead of a percentage of their total health, as is more typical in games. That means it’s harder for them to reach 100% HP, but the lower their health is when they use the kit, the more HP they get back. After some cycles of testing and iteration, we settled on each kit healing 80% of the damage you’ve taken.
Our health scanners heal deliver heals based on a percentage of the damage you've taken, not your total health pool.
This is a little bit tricky, so let’s run the numbers for a few different scenarios. If a player has 60HP out of 100, they’re down 40HP. Remember, we calculate the healing amount based on the HP a player is missing, not their total HP. If they use a health scanner at that moment, they’ll get a total of 40 * .8 = 32HP. If they hold that health scanner until they lose a few more HP, and have, say, 40HP left of 100, then that same health scanner will heal them for 60 * .8 or 48HP. That’s a pretty good return, but if you really want to powergame your healing, you wait until you have 1HP left to use that scanner and you’ll be rewarded with 79HP back. It just makes good sense to wait until you’re on the verge of death to crack the seal on a health scanner.
But what, you might ask, could you do if you really wanted to crank up the incentive to play cooperatively? Does it make sense to make healing another player more effective than healing yourself? Seems smart, right? We thought so too, until we discovered some negative side effects in our testing. Giving too much of a bonus to smart co-op play resulted in players telling players who healed themselves that they were “playing wrong”, which turned an opportunity for a co-op moment into a transaction that takes agency away from players and feels more like work than fun. Not a good outcome.
So what have we learned this week? Sometimes a small, subtle buff is much more effective at encouraging co-operative behavior than a bigger buff. And it always feels really good to take a moment in the middle of a huge fight to give your friend who is badly hurt a giant heal. But most of all, encouraging cooperation is a goal that affects almost aspect of the game, so if you’re going to build a co-op game, you need to start thinking about that from the beginning.
If you’d like to know more about our design pillars, the rules that we’ve used to develop The Anacrusis, you should check out our first Dev Blog, which gives a good overview of them all. If you’d like to know more about how we’re making The Anacrusis, head on over to our store page and smash that wishlist button and you’ll be amongst the first to hear when we post a new update. And if you want to get into the conversation, be among the first people to play The Anacrusis, or just hang out and play in our weekly co-op game streams, hop into our Discord where you’ll be surrounded in the cooperative embrace of other wonderful co-op game fans.
We often say that we designed The Anacrusis to be cooperative from the start, but we haven’t really talked about what that actually means. If you recall from our first post, one of our studio’s core goals is to make games that are about players working together. That’s the lens through which we make every design decision. When someone comes up with a new feature, we build a prototype and test it, both internally and externally, to see how it works in practice.
As an example, our first version of the perk system was a big hit with most testers. Players loved being able to choose meaningful, fun upgrades that add different twists to each run of the game. But, the perks created a competition problem. In our first version of the perk system, we placed them in the world like health or weapon drops. That worked great for the players who like to play out in the front of the pack--they always got the best perks. But it encouraged unfortunate loot goblining tendencies of some players, instead of sharing perks with their teammates, they’d hoover them all up for themselves. It was less compelling for the players who tend to trail the group. Instead of the vaunted Explode-y Headshots perk, they got everyone else’s unwanted castoffs, if they were lucky. Perks were a good feature, but they encouraged competition between players. How did we fix them?
Matter Compilers turn a moment of excitement for one player into a thrilling co-op moment for all four players.Enter, the Matter Compiler. Instead of letting the Driver place random upgrades in the world, now we spawn a single item called the Matter Compiler. Each player can use each Matter Compiler, or MC for short, one time. When they do, the Matter Compiler lets them choose one new perk from a set of two or three potential upgrades. Instead of furtive players grabbing all the loot, a moment of excitement for one player and disappointment for everyone else, finding a matter compiler gives all the players something to be excited about.
As a general rule, we try not to make players compete for resources. Weapon drops are a perfect example—we never want someone to see a primary weapon and not be able to replace the one they’re already carrying. Most weapons you find in the world are infinite spawns, meaning as many players can pick them up as want that gun. Again, this fosters cooperation, and encourages players to use the ping system, which we designed to make it simple for players to share information in the game, even if they aren’t using voice. When a player pings a gun, a marker pops up on the HUD and their in-game character plays a voice line that gives the other players even more information about the drop.
There are exceptions to every rule. We build a handful of weapons that are so staggeringly powerful they’d break the game if we let everyone have them (fear not, we’ll tell you more about them in an upcoming post). We give players so many grenades that they’re effectively unlimited even though the individual pickups are discret. And we do some good, weird stuff with health kits to encourage even more cooperating.
Instead of distributing health evenly amongst players as pickups, but we use a couple of tricks to encourage players to distribute health amongst the team. It feels great to help a teammate, so we make it easy for players to heal other players. When you’re holding a health scanner, left-click heals you while right-click will heal the player you’re facing. But there’s another layer. Our experience making Left 4 Dead taught us something interesting. The longer a player holds on to a healing item, the more likely they are to use it on a teammate instead of themselves.
How do you encourage a player to not heal themselves when they are injured? It took a few tries, but eventually we landed on a perfect solution. We made healing items restore a percentage of the HP the player is missing instead of a percentage of their total health, as is more typical in games. That means it’s harder for them to reach 100% HP, but the lower their health is when they use the kit, the more HP they get back. After some cycles of testing and iteration, we settled on each kit healing 80% of the damage you’ve taken.
Our health scanners heal deliver heals based on a percentage of the damage you've taken, not your total health pool.This is a little bit tricky, so let’s run the numbers for a few different scenarios. If a player has 60HP out of 100, they’re down 40HP. Remember, we calculate the healing amount based on the HP a player is missing, not their total HP. If they use a health scanner at that moment, they’ll get a total of 40 * .8 = 32HP. If they hold that health scanner until they lose a few more HP, and have, say, 40HP left of 100, then that same health scanner will heal them for 60 * .8 or 48HP. That’s a pretty good return, but if you really want to powergame your healing, you wait until you have 1HP left to use that scanner and you’ll be rewarded with 79HP back. It just makes good sense to wait until you’re on the verge of death to crack the seal on a health scanner.
But what, you might ask, could you do if you really wanted to crank up the incentive to play cooperatively? Does it make sense to make healing another player more effective than healing yourself? Seems smart, right? We thought so too, until we discovered some negative side effects in our testing. Giving too much of a bonus to smart co-op play resulted in players telling players who healed themselves that they were “playing wrong”, which turned an opportunity for a co-op moment into a transaction that takes agency away from players and feels more like work than fun. Not a good outcome.
So what have we learned this week? Sometimes a small, subtle buff is much more effective at encouraging co-operative behavior than a bigger buff. And it always feels really good to take a moment in the middle of a huge fight to give your friend who is badly hurt a giant heal. But most of all, encouraging cooperation is a goal that affects almost aspect of the game, so if you’re going to build a co-op game, you need to start thinking about that from the beginning.
If you’d like to know more about our design pillars, the rules that we’ve used to develop The Anacrusis, you should check out our first Dev Blog, which gives a good overview of them all. If you’d like to know more about how we’re making The Anacrusis, head on over to our store page and smash that wishlist button and you’ll be amongst the first to hear when we post a new update. And if you want to get into the conversation, be among the first people to play The Anacrusis, or just hang out and play in our weekly co-op game streams, hop into our Discord where you’ll be surrounded in the cooperative embrace of other wonderful co-op game fans.