Games » L.I.N.K.ed (prototype, 2013 - 2014)

While playing multiple top-down shooters with cooperative modes, I was disappointed that their cooperation was limited to shooting the same enemies and reviving other players if necessary. Therefore, I decided to develop a cooperative top-down shooter for 1-4 players (network or shared screen), that requires more interactions among the players.

The central mechanic of this game are visible links between all players, building a polygon. Objects like control points can be enabled by keeping them inside the links, while enemies try to disrupt these links. If a player looses all links to the others, he or she dies and has to be revived. This encourages players to stay together and coordinate their movements. There are two main modes available, one in which four control points must be defended and one offensive mode in which the players must follow a chain of control points on an infinite plane.

The enemies themselves are designed to require cooperation, too. This includes directional shields or linked enemies that must be killed simultaneously. Other enemies leave regenerating husks that can only be killed by sweeping them with one of the links. Weapon powerups in turn offer the players the ability to specialize themselves against certain types of enemies.

While being my first larger project with Unity and a design challenge first and foremost, I implemented some interesting algorithms for calculating the convex hull between players or intercept courses for the enemy AI.