For the first presentation we had to come up with a concept for our game, the story, mechanics etc. Our team firstly setteled on it being a friends co op game of some sort, perhaps a couch co op or similar. This lead to our first idea, a fps boss room battler, kinda like elden ring but fps and co op. But we figured we would never have time for this big of a concept. Therefore we move on and with the basis of RV there yet? we came up with a boat based version of it, where you play as a group of penguins who borrowed money from a fishy loan shark and then lost it all on a crypto currency called fishy-coin. This lead to them having to smuggel arms and similar illegal things. Making this a friendslop game also lowered our delivarables and hopefully we will be able to create a real game with in the time frame.
what I worked on
For the presentation I worked on the business case and USPs. Already before starting my research I knew that friendslop and games that are like a 3d place for interactions between friends have been up and coming so I was pretty certain we would have a strong business case. However coming up with the USPs were harder because the unique selling point of our game is literally just creating a fun enviorment for friends to have a good time, this both through the story and the game mechanics, like fun physicas and creating social fritction.
script
This is what I wrote as my script in the end.
So what makes our game standout?
First we have a highly meme-adjacent narrative, as you heard before. It's an absurd story and premise designed specifically to be funny and instantly sharable on different social media platforms.
Second we have fully embraced the 'friendslop' aesthetic, prioritizing physics based fun and social friction over deep polished complexity.
The core gameplay loop requires high stakes coordination. Players have to manually row in sync, balance the boat and frantically fix problems together.
This intentional cliumsiness guarantees shared failure, and is a recipe for a hilarious, highly clipable game and leads to very fun emergent gameplay created by the players themself.
We are aiming to target casual friend groups, young adults and content creators, who have already played some games. Therefore our target platform is Windows PC, also because it's easier to develop there.
If we look around online our business case is strong. Through out 2024 and 2025 the PC market saw a incredible rise in the affordable coop games market. Consumers seem to be treating games more as low stakes virtual third places to interact with their social circles. This can be seen in steams top new paid games of 2025. Here R.E.P.O, Peak, schedule 1, and RV There Yet? are friend slop coop games, Mage Arena is also one in the top 20.
Here the pricing strategy is very important, in this genera the one of the main things is reducing barrier of entry and having a sub 10$ price point. Since these games usually capture friend groups one sell can lead to multiple therefore the low price point is needed to get the full friend group through the door. (Show sales numbers with the price tags)
While the broader market is trying to have high retention this is something friend slop games don't care about. Industry data shows that 30 day retention rate is only around 3%. This tells that consumers buy these games for a intense, hilarious weekend with friends. Therefore we are not wasting budget on endless content. We aim to make the first 5 hours incredibly strong since this is the golden window where streamers generate promotional footage for viral sales and friend groups convince each other. (Show retention thing) This is also one of the reasons we choose this genera because we hope to be able to create a sellable game with in the time frame of this course.
Sources:
https://games.gg/news/best-selling-games-of-2025/ https://appmagic.rocks/blog/friendslop-steam-games-2025
Btw, writing this after the fact of the presentation.