Trying to summarize what this game is and how it ended up where we did is incredibly difficult. This project has been through so many iterations, many of which happened because making an asymmetrical multiplayer game is very complicated and our little game studio Clapstool consisted of three developers who were still very much learning about game design as a whole. We learned by doing and we learned from mistakes... and this project had quite a few 'mistakes'. From overscope, feature creep and miscommunications to disagreements on what the game should be. Despite the difficulty of the project it was also one of the most exciting games that we believed had the most potential from all our previous projects at Clapstool Studios.

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In Very Agent you either play as a guard or as a robber. As you might guess, the robbers objective is to steal and the guards are actively working against this goal. One of the biggest challenges was trying to make both sides fun to play. Being a robber is exciting, because it feels dangerous and cool to sneak around trying to rob a museum, but how could we ensure that being a guard had its own exciting qualities? The act of patrolling and hoping to run into a robber was no fun so we needed to give them something that allowed them to strategize as well. We added surveillance cameras, traps, alarms and one very important thing; locks. Each guard has the ability to carry a lock and place them on one of the three vaults to better secure them. A vault with locks takes longer for a robber to open and thus it increased the chance for the guards of caching a robber in the act. This was a huge improvement to the game and it shifted our perspective on how we could make both sides fun and equal without making them have the same abilities. You could say that the only thing we wanted both roles to have in common was that they needed to have the possibility to strategize and work together by communicating their plan and whereabouts with their walkietalkies.

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Since it'd be an enormous and unnecessary undertaking to write about the whole process in depth, I decided to simply put all the important evidence from my graduation project in the gallery below. It's in chronological order and it includes reflections, design choices, concept art, iterations, playtest results etc. Keep in mind that most of this is just my contribution on the level/environment art, because this was my graduation project, but if you want to see more about Jenna's work you can find that here. As always Alex did all the programming and for the animations we had help from Tim van den Berg.

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