Hot-Hog
The game
Role: Lead game designer.
"Pac-Man meets Twister"
Hot Hog is a party game intended for
4 players - and one keyboard.
I designed the game to treat the medium -
the keyboard -
with as much attention as I
treat the game itself;
making sure that the fun can happen both on and off the screen.
The game is simple: there is a level, built like a maze, with a start point and an end point.
The level is patrolled by hungry hogs which the player must avoid- but here's the catch:
the player's character is controlled by the up, down, left and right keys... except those keys change.
Four players are playing the game, controlling the same character; each player is in charge of one direction (e.g. one player can only go left) but the keys change every few moments.
The design turned a relatively simple game into a complex one, which requires full team communication to succeed.
The design process
As with any GGJ, time was of the essence, and the themes this year weren't easy:
make me laugh + intertwined.
Therefore, I deduced that if I were to take the "intertwined" theme literally,
I could definitely make everyone laugh.
Through that, was born the idea of having hands tangled together with one keyboard.
It meant that we didn't have to use any special equipment or code anything overly complicated.
After we agreed we would like four people to control one character,
we moved through several iterations.
The iteration we chose was a Pac-man style game, where it will be the most likely for each player to have an equal amount of gameplay time.
To increase the difficulty for the players,
I decided to have each player's key change after a few seconds,
so their attention would have to be split between the screen and the keyboard.
