Be the last player standing in Mobile Arcade: a portable party game where your phone is the controller!

credits:

Hugh Kennedy, System Programming @hughskennedy

Tommy Graven, Gameplay Design, programming @tommy_goodgame

Doruk Hasdoğan, Environment Design @DorukHasdogan

Ece Seyrek Hasdoğan, Character Design @EceSeyrek

From left to right; Ece Seyrek Hasdogan, Doruk Hasdogan, Tommy Graven, Hugh Kennedy.

Mobile Arcade is a arcade party game designed for public spaces, inspired by early-00’s party games such as Mario Party and Crash Bash. We’ve found a way to have players control the game using their phones over a WiFi network, instead of using traditional console controllers. The game itself is a series of small minigames played in quick succession, with players facing off against each other to be the last one standing.

We wanted to build a game that worked well with a small crowd in a public, urban setting: something you could walk past in a bar, for example, and start playing on a whim for a few minutes at a time. Phones work really well for this, letting us easily support 20 players at once without needing to supply everybody with their own game controller which passersby may or may not be familiar with.

We have a WiFi hotspot next to the game that players can join. Once a player connects, a webpage pops up with a joystick-ish controller and they’re ready to go! Players then have to roll around the scene, knocking others off the edge of the scene before somebody else does the same to them.

We did the environment design with an iterative process as well. Although we added lots of environmental details in the background, we used pastel colors and fog, so that the background wasn’t distracting attention more than the actual play area and the characters. Because the game graphics are lowpoly, pastel colored, and cartoonish, we used simple, flat design for the controllers’ UI with again pastel colors that are matching with the players’ characters’ color.