Hey there! As you know, we've been hard at work on local co-op play. Well, the time has just about come for us to release it into your grabby hands! Not stopping there, we have also revisited the core mechanic and changed how Skullcaps work in response to your valuable feedback. Today, I want to dig into how the co-op works. On Wednesday, I'll talk about what we've done to make the core mechanics more EXCITING! From the very beginning, we saw ourselves playing FranknJohn with a buddy. We all grew up wasting away summer holidays in front of a SNES with our friends, squirting water guns at zombies, hurling red shells and Shoryuken'ing each other in the face. It was a magic time. A time, that time itself has seemed to forgotten. We want to bring a bit of that magic back. We've been very conscious about avoiding a 'tacked on' feel, where perhaps one player has more authority or power than the other. In FNJ, both players are equal. With the change to Skullcaps (more on this in Wednesdays post), you can adopt play styles that compliment each other. You could play it safe and use range, get up close and personal, or a mixture of the two. You must really work together to overcome the games challenges. Here is a list of the current co-op mechanics and rule sets:

• A second player can drop into the game in the hub by pressing start
• Enemy health is scaled up (this may extend to damage/enemy count)
• Enemy aggro is distance based (may change to dmg based)
• If a player dies, the living player can cast Blood Sacrifice to resurrect them - at the cost of a 50% health transfer
• Marbles are shared
• Upgrades are shared
• Game camera follows the average position of both players, no split-screen
• You can use a combination of two controllers, or one controller & keyboard/mouse.

What we plan to add in the future:

• Character selection screen - at the moment if you want to swap characters, you must swap controllers
• Co-op Skullcaps - heal/buff partner by headbutting them? Yes please!
• Mini-games - FranknFootie, FranknSumo, lot's of fun possibilities!

I hope that has given you a taste of what local co-op is like in FranknJohn. I'll be back on Wednesday to break down the combat changes with you. Things are also progressing nicely with The Furnace of Anger, the next big update after this one. We'll be sharing our work-in-progress with you over the coming weeks! Oh! One last thing. We also took the time to upgrade to Unity 5, so you should notice some nice performance gains. Have fun and thanks for playing, Paul and team

[ 2015-05-11 13:17:28 CET ] [ Original post ]