Roboleon
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.
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.
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.
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 is 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 design decisions had been made that did not communicate clearly to the players what the visuals themselves were meant to communicate.
This was further supported by the results from the testing the QA department had run.
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. Although I needed coding from others to help with it, I am proud that I managed to find a way to morph between more than three shapes. I also contributed with the visuals of 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.