Concept
Rocket crisis is a game prototype built during the 2015 Global Game Jam. The theme for this jam was ‘What do we do now?” and this gave us the idea to make a game revolving around teamwork.
The basic concept was to make this an optimization game where players have to balance their long term goals against short term goals, within a time limit. This would encourage continuous debate (or conflict) among the team members to determine which tasks would have priority at any given time.
This was done by having a main task to be completed slowly over time in the form of construction of a spaceship from collected resources, and numerous smaller tasks in the form of crises which can be either dealt with or ignored by players. Ignoring a crisis carries a penalty, some of which could be quite severe. At the same time, you can not solve every crisis, as that means you will not have enough time to complete your main task. So you have to carefully consider and pick your battles, all while stressful collecting resources to complete these tasks.
Unfortunately, the game was not really all that fun, in the end. While the game concept was quite interesting (and this already showed during gameplay), the actual game loop of completing tasks was not great. The core activity of the game was collecting resources to bring them to drop off points, to complete these tasks, and while under the time constraints this was quite stressful (as intended), it was not terribly interesting.
I would have liked to add some more features to make it more interesting and really challenge teams to work together:
- Resources which need one player to help another player access the resource.
- Resources which can only be collected by one specific player.
- Players able to collide with each other in narrow passageways to create some conflict
- Tiny obstacle courses which would make resources a bit more difficult to reach. Things like a gap to jump over, a tricky to climb spiral staircase, or other traps.
- Rebalanced, more interesting and more severe crisis events. Making it so that ignoring a crisis or solving it is a really big deal, instead
Most of these create potential for things to go wrong and increase tension. Situations become more interesting when thing go wrong.*
Alas..It took quite a long time to really work out the core ideas of the game in detail, so we barely had enough time as it is without these extra features, and the final prototype is decent, but could have been much better. But if you play this game with a group of 4, flailing around and stressing to beat the timer, then it is possible to see a glimpse of big potential here.
* Source: Every zombie movie/series/game ever. Also Dwarf Fortress.
Sanderman0 