Hey everyone, we on the Discord were talking about the possibility of having minigames like Hide and Seek (thanks @freqzy from Discord) in the plaza, so we came up with the idea of tying it into the upcoming player group feature. As we know, the grouping feature will be useful for letting players queue up for games and activities together, but it could use some extra fun incentives!
Essentially here’s how it could work:
You invite friends or other players into your ‘group’ in the plaza.
In the tab menu, there’d be a new section for minigames.
As the group owner, you can start a minigame for the entire group, and people can opt to join in (similarly to how it prompts the server to join laser tag, or typing derby or whatever).
After each minigame/round, small unit payouts would be awarded for participation (and bonuses for winners).
The group owner can end the game at any time.
For something like Hide and Seek, it’s pick a random player within the group to be the seeker, and the others would be given around 30 seconds to hide somewhere in the plaza. After time is up or the seeker finds everyone, the game would end and payouts would be awarded. Then a new round would begin and it’d just continue until the group owner decides to stop the game.
Furthermore, we also came up with the idea of race courses around the plaza! This would be a new activity where you and your group can queue up to race around a certain pre-made track in a sort of parkour-esque minigame. Jetpacks and other items would be disabled, so you’d have to find a way by jumping around, sprinting, etc.
This could be a could way to get players to explore certain parts of the map that are less often visited, and it’d be fun to just see groups of players running across the rooftops or the beaches.
@CalculatorSpoon mentioned the idea of also having bicycle races on the beach, which could be really cool once we get vehicles/mounts added to the game.
If you have any more ideas for little minigames or feedback on this idea, feel free to post em below. I’ll also try to get a mockup of the UI for this whenever I have time (probably won’t be a while cause of exams though )
I like it but why limit this to groups? Why not just tie it into the plaza events so that it’s available to everyone? These could just be new plaza events
I did consider this, but I feel like something like Hide and Seek would work better in smaller friends-only groups. It would be hard to manage with an entire lobby involved, and it’d probably be more fun with the smaller circle anyways.
On the other hand, due to the nature of em, the races could probably just be made into regular plaza activities. Gonna keep it up there anyways
Hmm, when I was talking in Discord I was talking purely about just starting these games from the group minigame menu, but I don’t see why they couldn’t be accessible just in general.
But then it begs the question of should we allow groups to play on their own for other minigames like bowling? It’s definitely something to ask about if this ever becomes a thing in-game.
I think for bowling, we could have ‘Group Lanes’ where only players in your group can play, but for stuff like Laser Tag and Typing Derby, I wouldn’t want a single group to hog it all the time.
Maybe groups could ‘reserve’ a plaza activity for some 5 minute interval where only they can queue up or something? I don’t know
Perhaps there could be handicaps placed on the hiders then? Like the seeker gets to use jetpack, speed shoes, magic trampoline, etc., but the hiders are stuck with basic movement (This would also get rid of a lot of the under-map spots).
Additionally, maybe hiders would turn into seekers once they are found, like in Virus. Another thought is that maybe after long enough without finding anyone, the seeker gets a Hot/Cold meter on their screen showing how close they are to the nearest hider? That would probably help make it more of an actual game.
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