Hi!
Thanks for all the amazing work, your game really brings back the feeling of training for an ATC. I'm trying to relay this feeling to the people around me. I think "multiplayer" can trigger all sorts of crazy ideas, however I hope mine are "relatively" simple. Currently what I've been doing is having player 1 play the game (pilot) and player 2 looking at a stream of that game and telling player 1 what to do (controller). This is great for simulating the speech of ATC and having to be really exact and unambiguous. I tried to think of ways how to improve on this without overcomplicating.
Separate input
Imagine player 1 playing the game and player 2 seeing a stream of that game.But player 2 does not see the input of player 1 and instead can make their own input per plane. Its only a visual change with planes still reacting only to player 1's input.
Why? Player 2 in this case would be the controller who can keep track of their commands on screen as if they were playing the game, but player 1 is responsible for putting the instructions through to the planes. This is very close to how we practiced irl.
Having two separate "windows" of the same game opens up many possibilities. For example for the controller view, a different color for airplanes under control and not under control or showing only a portion of the entire view. For the pilot view showing weather only to them which they should report to ATC and they should avoid or giving them the option to manually select an event for a plane (fuel dumping, engine failure, comms failure, hijack) etc etc.
Flight strips
should having two separate windows not be within scope I have another suggestion: flight strips. Flight strips irl should be a reliable backup when the digital system fails so this should work. I believe all that is needed is a list of the next airplanes to show up in xx minutes. Print it out or have it on a notepad for example, stream the game and its now a 2 player game where the controller can make their notes on the flight strips.
Even better if the list is in a flight strip format including entry point, cleared speed, flight level etc.
kill plane & restart same game
Just two suggestions that would make the game more friendly for two players of different skill. Remove a plane if there was a mistake on either side so you don't need to restart the entire session and restart the game with the exact same planes so you can use the same flight strips.
Thanks for reading my musings and for the game!