Introducing Shooter Buddies - from Solarflare Fire

Hey everyone, we are Solarflare Fire, a group of 3 university students from the University of Chile who are working on a game project for our multiplayer game design course. Our names are:

• Ignacio Arros
• Martín Reyes
• Tomás Villegas

The goal of the project is to make a game with at least one innovative game mechanic, while at the same time making it multiplayer, so you can play it with your friends online!

We chose to make a top-down co-op shooter game called Shooter Buddies. The idea is quite simple: you play as two soldiers (and possibly more, we are still figuring it out) fighting hordes of enemies. There are different levels players can play, and there will be lots of types of enemies players can shoot at. However, the interesting part comes from interacting with your partner or "buddy": At any time, you can press a button to ask your partner to swap your equipment with his, and if he presses the same button, both will instantly exchange all weapons and special abilities. This will provide an entertaining twist to the game, for example letting players get out of situations where they might be surrounded by enemies and only having a shotgun at hand, but their buddies have a minigun, so by swapping weapons they could easily get out of that situation.

We are still trying to figure out what type of roles or weapons the game might have, and what could incentivize players to swap equipment more often. For now, the important thing is to get co-op shooting and swapping working for the first prototype, and later on design a level with a few enemies so we can test this mechanic more thoroughly.

As an end note for this first devlog, we will release a few prototypes as we work on the game, so look forward to playing them in the near future. We are hoping the final product will be worth the wait ;).

The next update on the project should be next week, and we hope to see you there!

-Solarflare Fire