[In this interview, first published in the September 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine, the student team behind the 4 player co-op title WOMP! detail the design process that helped them make an unusual and award-winning game.]
The student title WOMP! offers an unusual take on the concept of couch-based multiplayer. Rather than giving each player an autonomous avatar, the game puts each user at the helm of a single appendage of a bizarre underwater contraption. Players must cooperate to swim, float, and propel their way through the title's series of underground caves, lest they find themselves fighting for control over their awkward, clumsy vessel.
During development, industry professionals Tom Frisina of thatgamecompany and Brenda Gershkovitch of Silicon Sisters guided the student team at The Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, eventually helping them win the Best Student Game Award at the 2011 Canadian Video Game Awards. Here, we dive into the development and creative process behind this unusual co-op title.
How did your team come together to work on this project?
WOMP! team: Our last semester of school allowed us to work on our own projects. However, to do so, we needed to create our own team, get industry support and pitch the idea to the school and get approval. Team formation was quite organic; all of us wanted to create a fun playable game at the end of the semester, and we naturally gravitated to each other to form our current team. It was important for us to have a wide range of perspectives while sharing the same goal.
What sort of tools did you use to develop the game?
On the art side, we used a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. We worked on Wacom's wonderful interactive pen tablets, the Cintiq UX21. For tech, we used the Torque X engine. It was a little tricky getting the game running on the Xbox, and the engine definitely wasn't polished enough to create a professional product with. But for a student project it worked well enough-we wouldn't have seen the same level of success without it.
What process did you use to design the game? Sketches? Paper prototyping?
All of the walls in our project room at the The Centre for Digital Media were covered with white boards. It's a great way to doodle and draw without constraints and inhibition. Our early sketches and initial drawings were up on the wall, and we had the chance to refine them as we saw fit. We didn't make a paper prototype, but instead jumped right into a digital version of our game, with was playable within a week.
