Process 

At first we only considered what kind of game would be fun to play. We tried to get rid of code complexity (not making it a cs project),  but there were no good ideas. After asking Daragh and having more discussion about the basic idea of playground, we generated our intention for this game, as written before.

Then we tried to think of some games using Prisoner's Dilemma. Mingquan had an idea that two players climb ladders. When they press left button they climb by one stage; when they press right button they climb by one stage, and the other fall by one stage. But if both of them press right buttons, they will fall by two stages together. If a player falls behind certain stages (say -5, if 0 is the beginning), then both of them lose the game. i.e. a player can only win when the other player does not lose the game. But we thought the mechanics of this game is kind of simple, and players may fall into stalemate really easily, so we didn't use it.

Then Brandon said his idea about the box game. The original game mechanics was that when you press the right button to mess up your opponent, the effect would be let him jump. We discussed about that but thought players might die really easily, since the opponent can choose the time to make you jump onto spikes. That was why we changed 'let your opponent jump' into 'increase your opponent's speed'. In order to make a balance in this game, later we changed 'increase your opponent's speed' into 'increase your opponent speed as well as lower your speed', or players would never be able to lower their speeds.'

Since none of us is familiar with C#, the function of pressing buttons together was not implemented. But the other game mechanics create some new strategy to the game. For example, if you are really harsh to your opponent and increase his speed really much, you will not be able to jump over a single spike, since you are so slow. Also, you cannot increase your speed yourself, so you just place yourself into death by treating others so bad. People can find more when they play this game.

At first we wanted to created pixel characters for the game, just like Super Mario.  googled some tutorial on"how to create pixel characters" and found out it is way more complicated than we thought. so we decided to go with stick figures instead.

(Tutorial link: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/42648699708/pixel-art-tutorial )

But later we thought maybe using a box as the character can make the game special, since this game is a simple game based on geometric shapes.

When creating the background music Kaalen used a software called famiTracker. It simplifies the process of making chip tunes by giving the user access to the different sounds that were available to the 8-bit video games from where chip tunes originated. He followed a tutorial online which gave him a basic idea of how to make a chip tune. You start with a bass line and then make a drum track.  then you build a melody on top of that and voilla. Kaalen used his musical knowledge to make interesting sounding tracks that tried to emulate the feeling of the game. Although only 2 tracks were used Kaalen made 4 tracks total.