Tag Team Burnout :: prototype

Gameplay

Toggle between which charcater you're controlling, one with the ability to heal the wounded, the other with the ability to attack rogue androids. You have to meet a certain threshold in order to reach the next area.

But watch out! If you use one character's ability too much, they'll be unusable until you find a meteor flower.

Plot Overview

Crash landed on an alien planet, you and you clone wake up from cryo-sleep with no mission objective from your leader. The plan to terraform it has gone off the rails. It's up to Lieutenant Sander and John Alpha to figure out what happened.

Controls

ACTION	Keyboard	Dualshock
Move	Arrow Keys	Left Joystick
Heal (Sander-Only)	Z, Shift	X Button
Shoot (Alpha-Only)	Z, Shift	X Button
Swap Characters	X, Spacebar	Square Button
Pause	Escape	Start

Background

Originally a birthday gift for Daneeyul (@MrDaneeyul), Tag Team Burnout is a game symbolizing the necessity of managing your own expenditure of energy. The game development community is prone overwork ourselves, so I wanted to recapture that in an arcade-like shmup.

Switching between characters was supposed to be like switching between tasks. If you do any one thing for too long, you get burnt out. So the message from the gameplay is to manage both sides of the gameplay mindfully, in order not to cripple yourself.

I had plans on addressing that in the story, but the overarching narrative never really established that theme in this snippet of the game. That was supposed to be introduced in Level 2 or 3. Lesson learned on my part.