Theme
Play and Audience
Context
When it comes to games, Audience can have multiple roles; from pure passive spectator to main game player.
I decided to look at Audience as a game mechanic. A few mechanics related to audience stood out, such as:
Twitch Implementation:
Quite recent but not completely new, it is possible to implement twitch in a game as a sub-mechanic. This allows the people watching a Twitch stream to have an input on the gameplay instead of just watching the stream alone. This trend started first with TwitchPlaysPokemon, and then grew in amplitude.
One of my favorite example of this is how it has been implemented in Vermintide2. Occasionally, events come up, and the people watching the stream can write in the chat A B C D. After the time has elapsed, the spectators' votes will add the modifier to the gameplay.
https://youtu.be/S-WiS3U4S2s?t=70
Contest Judge Vote:
As often seen on TV shows and contests, the audience can also be part of the people who grade the player performance.
Since concept is more represented in games by the game giving you the grade without hinting much judging behind the player's behavior but rather on pure statistics and tracking.
In games, especially mobile games, this is very present but often looks like the following:
Method
I decided to implement Audience as a mechanic by creating a prototype where judges would be spread across the map, and would judge the player based on three factors:
- Time
- Least amount of jumps
- Least amount of falls
Each judge is holding a panel which can show a number from 0 to 10. The session starts recording from when the user hits the start zone, and ends when the player hits the end zone, generally next to the judges.
Unlike the majority of games where the judging only happens at the end, I wanted to explore adding judging constantly through the level as a form of play.
In the future, I want to extend this by adding modifiers on the player (like the Twitch mode) based on the player's results. For instance, if the player had under 2/10 for time, the player will walk a lot slower for 20s.
No body allowed!