A QUICK DEATH

A Quick Death is a 2-player one-button local multiplayer shootout game that was developed for a game jam by myself and my friend Taurice Couser. We enjoyed it so much that we continued to work on it. I worked on the design and programming. AQD was made in Unity. You can find A Quick Death on Steam and itch.io.

Design Consideratoins

AQD was a fun game to work on. The idea behind it was to start off with a simple mechanic and take it to it's extreme logical conclusion. Our starting mechanic was a two-player quickdraw in the form of a western showdown: the quickest player to hit the shoot button wins. The core components being reflex and timing. To this end, we quickly came up with the idea of extraneous obstacles blocking each player, making timing more of a concern. Additionally, we arrived at the accuracy mechanic, which builds over time, giving the player a decision trade-off between firing quickly and inaccurately or waiting for a killshot. The fact the game is completely symmetrical creates an environment of calculated risk and opponent psychology. As development continued it was realized that obstacles and environmental hazards can be added almost limitlessly as long as the player vs. player symmetry is kept.

AQD is a very easy game to pick up, but I'd like to think it has a certain depth that one can learn over time.