Lara Croft has starred in many adventures over the decades, from ancient tombs to shipwrecked islands. While she can handle most of her exploits solo, she still needs the occasional helping hand – most notably in Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, where Lara joins with up to three companions for fast-paced top-down action and puzzle solving. With Temple of Osiris coming to GameNight, we talked with Ryan Meyer, development lead for the GameNight version, about adapting Lara Croft’s cooperative adventure.
GameNight allows players to instantly jump into a game without dedicated hardware, using their phone as the controller. What makes Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris a good fit for the platform?
Ryan: I've been having a lot of fun with Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris because of its co-op/competitive gameplay. It's a great fit for people to sit down on a couch together and play through it. You work together to beat the game, but you can also compete on things like gem count and score charts at the end of each level. It's super quick to get in and out of, and it offers a lot of moment-to-moment gameplay that makes everyone laugh, groan or cheer together.
Temple of Osiris was not originally designed for touch screen controls; how did you approach designing the controller interface for GameNight?
Ryan: This was an interesting challenge because this isn't typical mobile game development. Sure, you're still playing on a mobile device, but you have to consider that the player is not looking at their phone most of the time. So, we needed to make sure the player could easily access every game action intuitively and ergonomically. The first step was mapping every action to a button on the touchscreen, then deciding on the control style and ensuring the buttons were large enough to hit accurately and reliably. Then it came down to playtesting and iteration.
What were the biggest hurdles you faced in designing and implementing the touch controls?
Ryan: When moving to touch control, you really only want to have up to two touch inputs needed at a time. There are several inputs that work well with a gamepad that don't easily translate to touch. For example, to engage the grappling hook you need to move, aim and then hit the trigger. Then you need to hold down the trigger to keep the grappling hook connected. Then when you need to jump with the grappling hook out, that's three inputs at a time. So, we needed to figure out a solution. Do we replace the mobile controller when the grappling hook is out? Do we auto fire the grappling hook? In this case we changed the grappling hook to toggle to release.
Then there was the inventory. For the original design, players were all meant to share the screen when changing their inventory selections. That meant if one player wanted to swap a weapon or ring it would pause the game for everyone. With the GameNight version, we can take advantage of each player having their own device. We were able to implement a new game flow that allows players to individually adjust their inventory on their mobile device without pausing gameplay. With this change the gameplay continues smoothly and keeps the action going.
Which character is your favorite to play?
Ryan: Personally I like characters that have the grappling hook, so Lara and Carter. I have to confess that when the whole team is walking across the grappling hook to get to the next platform I've given in to the temptation to pull the grappling hook back. "Whoops! I slipped! I guess somebody should pick up all these gems, don't worry I'll take care of it."
Any other stories or thoughts on the development that players would enjoy hearing about?
Ryan: The web controller went through a lot of iteration. First, we had three buttons on each side of the web controller, each near a virtual thumbstick. We started with an “expedition” theme to the background design. Through playtesting we changed the theme to be “Mystical Egyptian,” which was a better fit for all the characters. We also moved the mine button with every iteration of layout design. Here are some of the work in progress images we went through when approaching the final design:
Grab some companions and experience Lara Croft’s co-op adventure on GameNight today!
