Fowl Play is an in development multiplayer party game which allows up to 4 players locally or up to 8 connected through Steam. Players will fight to the death in multiple fast paced rounds to win the game, all whilst "gifting" each other crazy power-downs such as swapping around controls or forcing that player to attack on beat like a rhythm game.
I designed and pitched this game to a small group of other designers and they joined the project to create a full development team. I am the Creative Lead for this game, and as such I have spent a lot of time designing and communicating with all members of the team to produce a successful result. I am also the Lead Programmer, and this involves all of the Networking and Gameplay code. The Networking in particular has been a new learning experience for me, as this game not only connects between clients for multiplayer gameplay, but also uses Steam to do so. This meant using SteamWorks API, and using that to create connections for the Networking transport. A short devlog I've written on Steam integration can be found below.
Currently the game has 3 different bird types and 7 colours, allowing for 21 unique birds. Moving forward we aim to have a total of 10 birds as well as unlockable hats for added customisation.
Fowl Play is a 2 - 8 player party fighting game. Each player controls a bird - which they can customize - and fights their friends in fast one-hit-kill rounds. The player who wins the most rounds at the end wins the game. As you can see in the images here the game has gone through many rounds of improvements and graphical upgrades, from the original prototype to the most recent iteration. I'm proud that the game has managed to find its own style and through development.
Each game will have a set number of levels needed to win, and the players progress is shown on the race-like graph seen below to encourage the competition between rounds. The game is incredibly fast paced, and so these screens that appear between rounds act as a natural pause and break for the players.
Fowl Gifts are collected throughout play and then between each round the players can gift these to each other. These powerups are always a disadvantage to the recipient, however, I have worked very hard on designing debuffs that are fun and engaging to play with. None of the Gifts have small percentage changes that would go unnoticed, they instead aim to change how the player can interact with the game. The gifting system is designed to appear random, but it actually picks the possible receipts of a gift based on a number of factors - including number of wins and the "Fowlness" of the gifts they already have. The gifting process is public, and so we encourage either playing locally or whilst on a call. The design goal here was to elicit conversation between players as the possible recipients try to convince the gifter. This is a multiplayer game and so the focus has to be the interactions between the players.
Networking also presented challenges when it came to gameplay decisions. The movement is currently client side - this gives the player much more responsive controls, however can cause a small amount of lag when it comes to player to player collisions. The next step for this project is to change the movement to be server side as this will be more consistent for all players, however it will require some predictive programming to make sure the movement still feels good for the players.
(Please note the below UI is subject to update and improvement to match the rest seen in the game)