My responsibilities
In charge of planning character control mapping, as well as finetune them ingame.
Communicate and collaberate with art, sound, programming, and design on features for the game.
Perform player tests with QA team member and analyze results.
Find solutions to issues and bugs that surfaced.
Prototyping the level layout
Creating some of the visual effects for the game.
Summary
Roboleon is a story-driven humorous and subtle-dystopian Platformer Puzzle Adventure game. It focuses on a playful movement system, a physics-based character design, and puzzle-solving.
In Roboleon my focus was mainly on the game design aspect, with supporting the level design and some responsibilities on a few of the visual effects that was to go into the game. A main element of the game design part was to keep a design document going and being the connecting bridge between the information that came back from QA and coming up with solutions to solve the potential issues. In addition to the QA feedback, I also performed internal testing to catch and make sure minor mistakes didn’t survive through production. In the role of game designer, together with the rest of the game & level design group, I also helped facilitate contact with the other departments on features that needed the more direct communication between the different groups, formulating features we wanted implemented and discussing with the other departments and what was feasible to produce within the timeframe.
For the level design part, I participated on an even foot during the paper prototyping phase where we planned out the layout of the ship in combination with the art director, and then becoming a more support role to the other level designers while focusing on using Shader Graph and VFXGraph to create some visual effects for the game
Three of the issues we ran into were as follows:
The level design was difficult to navigate. Players got lost and we needed to fix that. The solution that was decided on was including a small arrow on the screen that would point towards the next objective that was active in the underlying task system.
Of the information given by the elements that were always on the screen, the visuals showing which tail attachment was picked was very vague to begin with. The solution in this case became to use symbolism and colors in an attempt to indicate to the player what they were using at any given moment.
There are buttons on the walls that the player interacts with several times during this game. This is another case of having some visual language that wasn’t communicated clearly. It did help that we introduce the first one in the small starting area and then quickly follow up with more. After the implementation of the navigational visual, that also helped with this situation.
A few takeaways
The QA department is a game designers best friends. Having statistics backing an argument, makes it easier to convince others about needed changes.
When dealing with a game world that is different from our own, it is important to teach the players about the signage/symbols used. It is easy to get blinded by knowledge the team has from working on something over a period of time. The more strange it is, the more guidance is needed.
Test early, test often, never stop testing.
Getting to experiment more with VFX in this production too, helped increase my interest in adding VFX knowledge to my toolbox.
The Preproduction Phase
Preproduction on this game was two weeks out of the 8 weeks of total production. During this phase, while we planned out the game and what the different departments were focused on, my job was to start up the design document and work with the other game and level designers on prototyping the overall design of what would later become the final spaceship setting for the game.
The above picture was the first step of planning the layout of the one world/level the game would have. We decided to keep this very simple and low-fi by using sticky notes with the room names, and in most cases the general shape we’d consider they might end up with. This allowed us to visually the layout and quickly make changes and discuss the advantages and disadvantages to each. This progressed into the next stage where we then tried creating spaceship shapes containing some of the different layouts we thought were the strongest contenders for our design and the narrative we wanted to tell.
Neither of these two designs made it into the final design as the art director came up with a third option that the lead group decided to go with. What it did do was help us decide which rooms were less critical to design and would require more work for lower benefit compared to the others.
This led to both the biodome and the canteen to be scrapped, but the rest of the room ideas did make it into the final design.
The Production Phase
The production phase itself lasted 6 weeks in total. As we went into this phase I kept track of gameplay issues that popped up and proposed solutions. Some of the more persistent ones was that a few visual designs had been made that did not communicate clearly to the players what they were meant to communicate. This was further supported by the results from the testing the QA department had run.
The solution was to do a few quick redesigns and test the response to them as soon as we were able to, which provided me the data to make a decision on which one to go with for the game.
As an aside from the game and level design parts, for the final version of the game I have a few different visual effects that I contributed with. Of the three most visible ones, the first is the figures on the menu screen that morphs as the player moves between the choices. I worked with a programmer on it, and I am proud that I managed to find a way to morph between more than three shapes, a thing VFXGraph was not set up to do at the time. I also contributed with the fires that spawn at some point during gameplay, which consist of three layers of effects, fire, smoke, and embers. Finally I created the forcefields that are visible in the hangar area of the ship.
Of the smaller effects, there are some sparks when the players character hits stuff at high speed or falls more than a certain distance and hits the ground.