Concept

Embody an animal as cute as it is good at climbing and show some dexterity to mount diverse environments such as seabeds or the jungle.

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Challenges​

• Ship a polished videogame in two weeks.

• Create a random yet diverse level design to provide a fair challenge.

• Use players feedback to improve the game. 

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Solutions​

• Delivering a game so quickly was a tough challenge that could be accomplished only by establishing a clean workflow from the very beginning of the production. That's why after a first day of pre-production, I immediately started working on the level design. By the end of the second day, most of the core gameplay was already programmed and added in the game, which allowed me to quickly iterate over and over. We settled for level design based on a random chunk generation, so my objective by the end of first week was to make as many chunks as possible - since we had to release the game on Android at the end of the first week and listen to players feedback to improve the game on the second one.  

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• The constraint of making a mobile game prompted us to make a game with few inputs for the player, to make the game as accessible as possible. The game is based on drag'n dropping the avatar's hands and feets on grips to make him climb as high as possible. This premise means that every bit of exoticism in the gameplay has to come from the level design. That's why we created special climbing grips with different effects : standard ones, collapsing grips, moving grips and ropes. With each grip comes logically a new feature the player needs to be aware of and a new challenge, and since the level design is just a bunch of chunks randomly stacked, my job was to make sure the level was not too hard for a player who just discovered a new mechanic, but still challenging enough for an experienced player who is used to the said mechanic. That's why in every chunk that contains a special grip, there are a certain amount of paths the player can use to go higher. Some paths are harder than the others, but they also are more rewarding thanks to the collectibles they lead to that increase player's score.

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• By the end of first week, the game had been well received by the players. However, there was still a lot of improvement to make, and the comments we received plus the datas we collected showed us so. The main critique we saw about the level design was the fact that it remained the same no matter the environment you played in. To address this issue, we decided to completely remodel our chunks system and divide them in several categories. One category would be the "common chunks folder" and all the other ones would be exclusive to an environment ("jungle chunks", "space chunks"...). The first day of the week began by sorting the chunks to decide in which category each chunk would go. Then, we spent the rest of the production creating new ones to keep a fair ratio between the categories. Since some environments would take longer to be unlocked, we knew we could also increase the difficulty of higher chunks. When the player starts a game, he now has to climb through chunks randomly picked between the "common chunks folder" and the chunks folder of the environment he plays in. This solution made the game much more diverse and less repetitive than it used to be.

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Role

Level designer

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