Design Background: Caffeine Rush is a tower defense game where one person plays as the company of Starbucks, and the other plays as the supplier of coffee beans to that Starbucks. The goal of the game is for the two players to work together in order to defend the Starbucks “base” from students who are craving caffeine during finals week. There are two types of students: a normal student who is craving coffee (represented by a green token) who can only move one square at a time and has one health, and an athletic student craving coffee (represented by the green token) who can move two squares at a time and has two health. The environment of this system is a 10 square by 10 square board with a 6 by 6 inner region that is more heavily outlined than the other squares. This is the inner boundary of the game. The students spawn on the outside of the boundary from a four sided die roll that determines which direction (North, South, East, West) they will spawn, and a six sided die determines how many students spawn. Each turn, a green student will move one spot, and a red will move two. The direction that they move is determined by a card draw. There are three different movement cards and one card that spawns a red student (athletic). After the students move, it is then the Starbuck’s turn for action. He can decide to use his money (each player starts with 20k) to hire baristas or to build a coffee stand. These baristas and coffee stands are this player’s attributes of the system, since these are the pieces of the game that he can control. The coffee stands can only be built next to another coffee stand or the Starbucks base, while the baristas can be “hired” from the Starbucks base or a coffee stand. Therefore, the coffee stands are a great way to expand the Starbucks’ territory. A green barista can fire one shot of espresso each turn, and a red one can fire two shots of espresso each turn. In his turn, he can also decide to move baristas closer or further away from students. It is the player’s duty to safely escort delivery men from the coffee bean supplier to the Starbucks. Since these two players have to work together, the Starbucks and the coffee bean supplier are two objects of a system that have a very important internal relationship. The game will not succeed if they do not help each other and strategically plan together. Then comes the coffee bean supplier’s turn. This player can either move his delivery men (move one spot per turn) or trucks (move two spots per turn) or hire more. These delivery men and delivery trucks are this player’s attributes of the system. Successful delivering of the coffee beans to the Starbucks building gives both players 20k each, which can then be used to further build defenses or more easily deliver beans.

Our inspiration for this game came from digital tower defense games such as “They are Billions” and “Bloons Tower Defense”. Tower defense games are strategy games in which the goal of the game is to defend a player’s territories or possessions by placing defensive “towers” to take down incoming enemies. However, in our game, we introduced another element, the challenge of delivering coffee beans to the Starbucks base, that creates a whole new layer of the game which allows our game to be cooperative, unlike the tower defense games mentioned previously. The theme and story of our game was inspired by the Starbucks inside the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons on the Georgia Tech campus. At any time of day, it can be seen with a huge line of students waiting on the line to order, with a huge horde waiting for their coffees after they’ve ordered. We agreed that we would exaggerate this type of environment that is filled with impatient students waiting to get their coffees in our game.