A Student Showcase entry in the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference Independent Game Festival.

This was project from my MFA days at the USC IMGD. During my second year, a group of us got together one summer and decided to make a game. The team included Mike Brinker, Jenova Chen, Vincent Diamante, Rick Nelson, Glenn Song and I. For my part, I focused on the core game mechanics, much of the level design, and AI scripting (simple as it was).

Two players must navigate parallel worlds, their distance to each other determining what they can interact with. One player might be in a maze full of traps, the other in an open arena full of monsters, but both must cooperate in order to survive. The sense is one of a three-legged race, and at its best players learn to cooperate at a visceral, non-verbal level.

The development process followed a fairly textbook example of prototyping early and often – first on paper, then in limited digital form. Moving from graph paper to glass beads to simple circles moving around in Macromedia Director, building a game with a complicated (and often arcane) mechanic from scratch proved quite an experience.