Crew of Two was my groups "Game Project 2" game. In Crew of Two you play as two deckhands, Augusta and Hastings, trying to keep the ship from sinking while shooting down the enemy ships and securing the treasure.

My work on crew of two was primarily focused around making a fun and engaging combat, and designing interesting mechanics to heighten the co-op experience. This involved prototyping mechanics, playtesting them, itteration and pitching possible mechanics to the rest of the team.

I also worked as project manager and design lead which meant making sure everyone knew what to do and kept up with the new plans as well as help resolving communication errors. 

After making the playership feel alive and interesting, we still noticed playtesters being unhappy with combat and said it felt like a chore. When questioned further they mentioned taking care of the ship was fun, but shooting back was not. At this stage the enemyship was simply shooting back, and the only other goal you had than to hit the enemyship was hitting explosive barrels, though alot of playtesters mentioned this to be unclear and those that knew to shoot for the barrels still felt it was easy since the ship was not moving and it was easy to just make small adjustments between shots.

To solve the issue of having boring combat I changed the tutorial to have a part where combat is introduced with a giant explosive barrel taking down the whole ship in just one shot. I knew this wasn't going to solve the whole issue, so I also made sure the enemyship started moving and gave the cannon a timer of 3 seconds, so after the cannonball was put into the cannon it would fire after 3 seconds, so the players had to move the cannon along with the movements of the enemy ship to make sure they hit. When playtesting the new combat the feedback was alot more positive to the combat, saying the goals were more obvious, and even though they were missing more often than before it felt more rewarding to hit a shot.