Name of the Game: Charades
Game’s Creator: Dmytro Cheverda
Platforms: iOS
Target Audience: party-goers, people looking for fast-paced multiplayer game, casual game player, friends looking to play a social game, etc.
Game Context: For more context, the game that my team and I have created is called Meltdown. It is a 2-player game that is mainly based on working together using collaborative control panels and a set of tasks to be completed with the other player. Using these tasks in our current prototype, both players have one minute to solve each collaborative task and successfully complete it.
“How does the game compare and contrast with your team’s concept?”
When I was thinking of a game to do my critical play on, my goal was to find a game that didn’t have to have to necessary have the same complete concept but evoke the same feelings that come with playing Meltdown. Seeing students from class play a run through of our game Meltdown made me realize that each tasks that the player had to complete was something done with urgency due to there being a time limit of one minute for each of the tasks. Thinking back on this made me think of Heads Up. Similiar to Meltdown, Charades has the same concept of multiplayer tasks that have to be done within a certain time limit, creating this sense of urgency. In both Charades and Meltdown, a set of rules is given to each player before completing each tasks that make the tasks more difficult yet super fun. However, while both of these games are multiplayer, the difference between the two games is that Meltdown has a variety
of different tasks that have to be done each within a min while in Charades, each task comes with the same overlying goal of helping the main player guess the right word within a certain time frame. In Charades,
they also have a point system for each task that is successfully completed; however, in Meltdown, we don’t have a point system for every task done successfully within the time limit. With that in mind, I think there is room for improvement in terms of adding some incentive to want to finish the tasks on times such as points. We, as a team, can probably also discuss if we want our game to have a clear winner with non-zero scoring or more up to the user using zero-one scoring.
With all this in mind, Charades inspired some ideas for Meltdown that I feel like could overall really improve how fun the game is and add more flexibility to it. In Charades, the intro screen shows multiple different decks of cards such as “Animals” and “Cars” giving the user more flexibility on what they wanna work with. Inspired by this, one idea that I was thinking that could make Meltdown more fun is giving the user an option of what tasks they wanna work with. This will prevent the players from getting bored of doing the same type of tasks over and over again. Another thing I noticed in Charades was that there is a time limit for each card and a time limit for the overall round. While in Meltdown, we decided for each task to have a time limit of one minute, I think we could also add an overall time limit and also timer that tells the two players how fast they were. This could give incentive to play more in the wants of a faster time. Overall, Charades and Meltdown are two very different games that I found have a lot of interesting similiarities at the same time.
