Defend Your Friend is a game in which players are not just important, but vital – each with a unique role to fulfill. Through working together, combining their abilities and having each other’s back players make their way through carefully crafted puzzles, slowly understanding the logic in their surroundings.
It is a 2D side (& up and down) – scrolling co-operative puzzle game where the players have to protect each other using their individual abilities. One player has a shield to block projectiles and reflect beams, while the other has a beam they can use to push away objects and activate mechanisms.
Defend Your Friend is made so that it is easy to pick up for anyone new to games, with simple controls and well introduced mechanics, making it perfect for introducing people into gaming!
Motivatie
Best Student Game
Defend Your Friend is currently being worked on outside of school, but with a team completely composed of students. It also initially started as a student project. Sony was very interested in our game, resulting it in being shown at their HQ about a month ago with some great responses. On top of that we've been showing it at a lot of different events, including some in the Netherlands (INDIGO, Indievelopment, Animecon, CodeMotion) but also some outside of it - we showed our game to other developers at ScreenShake in Belgium, and at the White Nights Conference in Prague. We also very successfully went through Steam Greenlight (when that was still a thing) and are planning to release this year!
We're very proud to have taken our game quite far beyond where student games are normally taken.
Notable for Game Design: Game Design is really the core of Defend Your Friend. All levels are carefully crafted and went through a lot of different iterations to make sure they intuitively introduce all mechanics, and let players experiment with the logic behind the puzzles in an interesting way. The focus on co-operative gameplay, in which both players are equally important and have to rely on each other, also posed an interesting challenge for us - with a lot of balancing and tweaking. It's been a been a very interesting experience to do this, and we're extremely happy with the result.
One of the interesting things about Defend Your Friend is how it is very accessible - but not at all holding your hand. All you're told is 'use the two sticks on the controller' and you're left to figure out the rest yourself. This means the game has a lot of potential for people new to games, but is also very interesting for people that have been gaming for numerous years - as the challenges come from the puzzles players have to overcome.
Notable for Art: We're very proud of how beautiful our game is shaping up to be. And it's not only pretty - we worked hard on getting game design and game art to compliment each other.
