"Parasol Protocol is an award-winning, chaotic, cooperative, party-puzzling time trial game for 2-4 players.
Trapped in the Parasol Conglomerate's new underground research facility, work together to solve escalating puzzles, outmanoeuvre preying robots, and navigate unpredictable challenges — not just from the facility, but from each other."
Parasol Protocol is a cooperative party-puzzle game designed around communication, coordination, and shared problem-solving under pressure. Players race through short, colour-coded levels where progress depends entirely on teamwork, timing, and the group’s ability to adapt together. Whilst the game embraces emergent, system-driven moments of chaos and tension, it is deliberately structured to remain readable and accessible, ensuring that objectives and responsibilities remain clear even as complexity increases. Developed in Unreal Engine 5.4 by our team, Fever Dream Tangerine, the project is currently available as an in-development build on PC via Itch.io.
As Team Lead and Lead Designer, I was responsible for the game’s gameplay, level, puzzle, and systems design, shaping clear, dynamic, and scalable mechanics that support a fully-realised, cooperative gameplay loop across different player counts. Alongside my core design responsibilities, I worked closely with the rest of the team to help shape broader aspects of the project, providing design direction and feedback across art, UI/UX, audio, and overall player experience.
The goal wasn't just to support cooperative play, but for it to be the game's core foundation, ensuring that progress is only possible through communication, coordination, and shared problem-solving. The game deliberately avoids solo play in order to fully commit to social interaction as the core challenge and source of fun. Unlike games where cooperative modes are an addition, here we ensure that everything is built from the ground up with co-op in mind, meaning every single player always has a key part to play.
A key pillar of the game is what I refer to as “Ping-Pong Game Flow”; a design principle intended to ensure that all players remain actively engaged throughout a level. Like a table tennis rally, responsibility is constantly passed between players, with no one left waiting for extended periods of time. Whilst moments of traversal and observation still exist, meaningful gameplay areas are structured so that every player is regularly required to act, communicate, or respond. This approach was central to preventing players from becoming passengers, and maintaining flow across different player counts.
The game also embraces designed chaos; emergent moments of tension, friction, and humour that come naturally from systemic interaction, rather than randomness or punishment. To support this, individual mechanics are intentionally simple and readable, with complexity created through layering: multiple players, overlapping responsibilities, time pressure, and hazards. This allowed the game to remain approachable while still offering depth through cooperation and replayability.
The game also steers clear of traditional fail states in favour of a fail-forward, momentum-driven experience. Rather than ending levels through game overs or hard resets, mistakes cost players time, not progress. Respawning with a short delay maintains tension without breaking flow, whilst guaranteed rewards for completing levels ensures that players can continue progressing even without optimal performance. This design supports experimentation, reduces frustration, and keeps the focus on problem-solving and communication rather than penalising players and forcing restarts.
Finally, the game was structured around short-form, replayable content to reflect how players are increasingly engaging with games and wider media. Levels are designed to be quick to play, and rewarding to master; with performance-based progression encouraging players to repeat levels and improve their team's performance. This structure supports a wide range of play styles, from quick, casual sessions to more competitive play, remaining accessible to a broad audience.
Together, these goals shaped Parasol Protocol into an experience where readability, cooperation, coordination and emergent social moments take center stage over mechanical complexity.
Parasol Protocol began as a much smaller, individual prototype developed during my second year of university under the working title Outbreak Escape. Originally created in Unity using C#, it was framed around a specific design brief: to explore accessibility as a core design pillar, informed by my own research into players with varying motor and cognitive difficulties.
This prototype was designed as a 1–2 player cooperative puzzle experience where players controlled colour-coded characters using a single controller. Levels were short, sequential, and timed, from an isometric perspective and built around clear visual language rather than any explicit instructions. Colour-based interaction acted as its primary form of communication, allowing players to infer goals and responsibilities without relying on text, or complex mechanics. At this stage, gameplay leaned more heavily on strict fail states, with player health and level resets via running out of time used to create tension.
Whilst this prototype successfully encouraged communication, coordination, and reliance between players, playtesting revealed several limitations in design. Frequent hard resets interrupted flow, and reduced accessibility over longer play-sessions, with linear progression limiting player choice and replayability.
The concept expanded into a team project in my final year of university, becoming what is now Parasol Protocol. The focus shifted further towards cooperative-first, scalable design, with systems built to support 2–4 players and an emphasis on both fail-forward, and performance-based progression. Hard fail states were replaced with time-based penalties in the form of short-delay respawning to maintain flow, whilst hostile NPCs were reframed from a direct threat into readable, systemic obstacles. This became a turning point, and moved the project’s direction from a punishing, time-pressured prototype into a more expressive, social, and forgiving experience.
The game’s structure evolved significantly alongside these design changes. Initially, the linear sequence of short levels was replaced with a seamless dungeon-like overworld where players navigated as a team to discover challenge rooms and earn keycards by completing them quickly, ultimately unlocking more areas of the overworld. This aligned with an early idea to deliver light narrative elements to promote intrigue, mystery, and discovery. However, through internal and external testing, as well ongoing consideration of project management and scope, this element of the game was ultimately cut. Instead, we began to favour a more focused, pickup-up-and-play cooperative party experience, allowing the purely mechanical, systemic gameplay elements to take center stage.
This refocus and refinement led to larger levels, and completion times increasing from 15+ seconds to a minimum of ~60 seconds. This allowed for deeper player engagement within individual levels, improved flow, and more complex level-puzzle design. Alongside this we also redesigned the level select structure. Our Lead Technical Designer, Ricco Vergara, proposed a Mario-inspired overworld, with defined routes and points of navigation. This design allowed for us to maintain player choice with branching progression, avoiding a strictly linear experience. This encouraged replayability and attempts at improving player performances. Progression became a balance of player performance alongside level completion, rewarding coordination and mastery without gating less experienced groups.
The project also transitioned from being developed in Unity to Unreal Engine. This decision was made primarily to support the team’s strengths and engine familiarity, allowing for faster iteration, easier collaboration, and a more comfortable development across team members. Working in a familiar engine enabled the team to scale the project more confidently and focus on design clarity and iteration.
Throughout this evolution, the project retained its original core pillars of design: accessibility and readability, minimalist mechanics, and reliance-based cooperation, whilst refining how those ideas were presented. Parasol Protocol represents the outcome of this process: a deliberately structured cooperative experience shaped by iteration, playtesting, and a conscious move away from punishing design towards flow, readability, accessibility, and shared problem-solving.
Parasol Protocol’s core systems are built around a small set of strict, readable rules that enforce cooperation and shared responsibility. Rather than relying on complex individual mechanics, the game derives its depth from how these systems layer together under time pressure, player dependency, and dynamic scaling.
At every level, the goal is the same: ensure that progress is only possible through coordination, communication, and active participation from every player.
Players are colour-coded (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow), and may only directly activate objects that match their assigned colour. Pressure Pads, Access Consoles, and other interactive elements (collectively known as Access Objects) respond exclusively to their corresponding colour, enforcing clear roles and responsibility within each puzzle space.
This system establishes collaborative dependency as a core rule. No single player can progress alone, and no puzzle can be solved without coordinated action. Colour association also functions as a strong visual language, allowing players to quickly understand responsibilities without relying on explicit instruction or UI prompts.
Buddy Balls & Cross-Colour Cooperation
To avoid absolute role isolation, Parasol Protocol introduces Buddy Balls; colour-coded objects that can be carried by any player, regardless of their own colour. Whilst players can't directly activate different colour Access Objects themselves, they can carry Buddy Balls to enable progression, using them as colour proxies.
This creates moments of both strategy and agency, allowing players to discover multiple avenues of progression and coordination, which further expands gameplay and puzzle possibilities. Alongside this, this added layer of choice directly affected perceived complexity; players would find themselves negotiating the "correct" solution to a problem when multiple were present, leading to moments of chaotic communication as different players would see different "correct" solutions to one-another.
Access Objects, Doors & Puzzle Logic
Primary progression in Parasol Protocol is authored through Doors and Access Objects; a modular system encompassing Pressure Pads, Access Consoles, Indicators, and more. These elements are designed to be; consistent in behaviour so outcomes remain predictable, as well as configurable per player count allowing puzzles to adapt without macro changes to level designs.
Doors and Access Objects are mapped explicitly for 2, 3, and 4 players, ensuring that cooperative responsibility scales meaningfully without introducing clutter or ambiguity. Visual Access Indicators reinforce system states and player responsibility, maintaining readability even during moments of chaos.
Player-Count Scaling & Dynamic Adaptation
All core systems are designed to scale across 2–4 players. While level layouts remain consistent, puzzle logic adapts dynamically to player count. This approach allows Parasol Protocol to support different group sizes without redesigning levels or compromising clarity, ensuring that cooperation remains meaningful regardless of player count.
Retired Mechanics
Throughout development, several mechanics were deliberately removed or reworked, including weapon-based interactions and more complex object behaviours. These decisions were made to reduce cognitive load, preserve clarity, and reinforce the game’s minimalist, cooperative focus.
An example of this is a Gravity Gun mechanic — Players would pick up a colour-coded gravity gun, and be able to grab and launch players and Buddy Balls across gaps. However, through internal and external testing, we found Gravity Guns to be clunky to use, and levels required larger spaces for them to be truly worthwhile — This led to levels feeling bloated, less tight, and lacking in flow.
By actively retiring such systems that conflicted with the project’s core goals, development remained disciplined and aligned with the intended player experience.
Parasol Protocol’s level designs prioritise readability, flow, and cooperation, and are symbiotic with the game's core designs, systems, and mechanics. Each level is compact, built with modular environments, and designed to accommodate 2-4 players without the need for macro changes.
The key design goal was to encourage communication, coordination, and timing-based action without overwhelming players visually or mechanically. To achieve this, levels were broken up into smaller "puzzle rooms"; these rooms would either incorporate the transitions between each room into their own progressions, or be directly linked between 1-2 other connected rooms.
This approach allowed for designs that were readable and visually isolated in progression, but still flowed naturally between their respective connected rooms; This meant that players could focus their attention on the puzzle room at hand yet still maintain a bigger picture of the level as a whole, reinforcing our priorities of readability and flow. Expanding to link certain rooms' progression to one-another, and briefly splitting players up further reinforced communication, and ultimately cooperation, as player progress became intertwined with collective progression over individual puzzle solving.
The level design process was flexible in construction; sometimes levels were built room-by-room, starting with isolated room ideas that freely developed and flowed into continuous room creation, resulting in a natural endpoint being found through iterative building and testing. Whereas on other occasions, a complete level outline would be created first, with a vision of a particular silhouette and flow in-mind, where these predetermined constraints challenged spatial thinking to maximise the use of a given space.
Parasol Protocol, and our team, Fever Dream Tangerine, has received industry-led recognition for our accomplishments at the Game Republic Student Showcase in 2025. Here we were the recipients of 4 awards:
🥇 1st place for Game Level Design, awarded by Distinctive Games
🥇 1st place for Game Audio, awarded by PitStop Productions
🥈 2nd place for Game Design, awarded by Sumo Digital
🥉 3rd place for Game Art & Animation, awarded by Atomhawk
Photos courtesy of Game Republic
Upon the team's graduation from university, a much-needed break was in order, and thus Parasol Protocol's development was put on hiatus. This time allowed for reflection on both our successes, as well as where we could improve. January 2026 brought about a new phase of pre-production, where we discussed the project at length, and planned out our next steps. As of March 2026, Parasol Protocol is back in production as a ground-up remake, with the goal of a full, commercial release planned for late 2027.
A key goal of the project since the time of its original conception has been a game that is accessible-by-design. During the game's previous iteration, we had discussed further accessible designs and added features, that were simply not feasible due to time constraints. This new iteration affords the team to further focus on this aspect of the game. Going forward Parasol Protocol will offer improved accessibility with some of the following examples:
Shapes - Although we offered some colour-blind options for players, this was not a fix-all solution; going forward, shapes will be explicitly included in the game's designs, with each player being allocated a specific shape — Circle, Square, Triangle, and Cross — alongside their respective colours. This will improve readability for all players, and be a much needed step forward in making the game more accessible. Here, the indicator around a player's feet will match their shape, and Pressure Pads will also follow suit, allowing players to better identify and differentiate their respective roles and objectives.
Dual-Character Control - A carry-over from my original prototype, and something that we did experiment with early in Parasol Protocol's original development; Dual-Character Control will allow players with only a keyboard, or single controller, to still experience local co-op play without the need to purchase another controller. During times of economic hardship, people should still be afforded the opportunity to pursue their chosen hobbies, and with Parasol Protocol being a cooperative-first game, we want to make sure players can experience without the added fiscal burden. The added upside of this feature is, that if people are wanting to challenge themselves, they will also be able to play the game solo, controlling two characters at a time, to truly test their skills and coordination.
Online multiplayer was not a feasible feature to originally include in the game considering the timeframe of development, yet is something that in the modern gaming age, is a must have. Although I believe the game is best enjoyed played locally, today's world doesn't always afford the opportunity for people to do so. With the game being cooperative-first, online multiplayer will allow more players to experience the game as intended (although dual-character control will still give solo players a viable, although more challenging, option), as well as help grow an online community whom may find one-another, making new friends along the way.
Parasol Protocol was developed by Fever Dream Tangerine, a multidisciplinary team working collaboratively across design, art, programming, and audio. Whilst I served as Team Lead and Lead Designer, the project was shaped, and wouldn't be what it is today without the combined efforts of the core team, and two specialist external collaborators.
Photo courtesy of Dr. Duke Gledhill
Fever Dream Tangerine:
Joshua Sykes-Ellis - Lead Programmer
Ricco Vergara - Lead Technical Designer
Mudaber Ahmed - Lead Artist
Maisy Adams - Environment Artist
Hannah Mcmullan - Prop Artist
Jack Hawksley - Technical Sound Designer
External Collaborators:
Tom Hickling - Environment Artist
Ethan Weston - VFX Artist
Our external collaborators contributed specific environment assets and visual effects to support visual consistency and polish.