What permadeath taught me about cooperative game design (7 games in 7 weeks – week 6)

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I’m currently doing a personal 7 Games in 7 Weeks challenge to get better at shipping small multiplayer games and learning from them quickly.

Week 6’s game is Dead Squad, a 3-player cooperative side-scrolling zombie survival game — and it’s the first one in the challenge where everything started interacting in messy, interesting ways.

You can play it here (free):

👉 https://join.rune.ai/game/QvqxHKXD-HQI

It’s built using Rune + Forge, which let me prototype real-time multiplayer without spending the entire week fighting infrastructure.

The core idea

Dead Squad is intentionally simple:

Three players move together through an auto-scrolling level. Zombies spawn in structured waves. Ammo is limited. When ammo runs out, you’re forced into melee. If all players die, the run ends.

There’s no traditional “win” state — the goal is to survive as long as possible and see how many enemies your squad can take down before everything collapses.

Designing cooperation without explicit rules

One of my main goals was to force cooperation through constraints, not tutorials or UI warnings.

Each player has a fixed role:

The center player is a melee-focused tank with higher health
The left and right players are hybrid gunners with strong ranged damage
Gunners automatically switch to melee when ammo runs out or enemies get too close

That single ammo constraint ended up doing a lot of design work.

Players naturally cluster around the tank.

They hesitate before spending bullets.

They panic when both gunners click empty at the same time.

No popups required.

The unexpected lesson: permadeath changes psychology

I added permadeath mostly for tension. What I didn’t expect was how dramatically it would change player behavior.

The moment one player dies:

Movement becomes tighter and more deliberate
Risk tolerance drops immediately
Players protect space instead of chasing kills
Coordination increases, even without voice chat

The mechanics don’t change — but the tone of the game does.

Difficulty sliders change numbers.

Permadeath changes how people think.

Systems that started colliding

Compared to earlier games in the challenge, Dead Squad forced me to juggle several systems at once:

Asymmetric player roles
Ammo economy and forced weapon switching
Structured wave escalation across a scrolling level
Boss encounters layered into continuous movement
Multiplayer state sync while the camera never stops

It’s still a small game, but it was the first one that felt like systems were colliding instead of politely taking turns.

Open questions

If I continue iterating on this design, these are the things I want to test next:

Are the player roles readable enough for first-time players?
Does the difficulty curve spike too hard once bosses appear?
Does permadeath feel tense and motivating — or just punishing over long sessions?

Right now it sits in an interesting middle ground where some players love the pressure and others bounce off immediately, which might be a feature or a design smell. I’m still figuring that out.

Closing thoughts

This project reinforced something I keep relearning:

Co-op games work best when systems quietly push players together instead of asking them to cooperate explicitly.

Dead Squad isn’t the biggest or flashiest game in the challenge, but it’s the one that taught me the most about how rules shape behavior — not just difficulty.