Bomber Balls

Level design in this racing game has a very high and close relationship impact on gameplay. Hence I was happy to take on both gameplay and level design roles, especially since in the early phase gameplay could only be done theoretically and researched.

In a single-player racing game such as this, increasing/decreasing the required best times for each medal (gold, silver, bronze) naturally directly increases the degree of difficulty. 

High Risk, high reward. Cutting corners or timing the jump just right should feel good when it is being pulled off. 

A failure such as a crash from a missed jump or a high pace collision should lead to the player wanting to restart and try again right away. Being and staying in the zone.

Since I found Spyro, I now wanted some more actual cat references and therefore researched cat content. Especially for the run-into-jumping animation. Since jumping over objects is one of the most fun and challenging gameplay moments. Yet the angles and length of jumps are very distinct for cats.

Cats can jump very long when they're running, but very high when sitting still. Programmers were able to make that system logic on a very basic level, but since it could have been much better, hence we limited ourselves with the amount of verticality/high jumps in the game.

Having 3 medals, the question of how far to spread them and to balance how hard the game should be was the biggest challenge. 

Watching people play and see where they struggle and succeed, the number of 

Getting an understanding together with the programmer(s), of what values we would have, I asked for everything to become a public toggle number.

In order to try and improve the player movement bit by bit and keep track of numbers, I created this table on miro

We went with Unreal Engine's 4.27 experimental chaos version, since working with chaos while having level instances was decided to have an upside. In the end, however, while interesting to learn and adjust to a process of multiple people being involved in using a new system, there was too much of a negative impact. 

Crash errors even with industry mentors and teachers couldn't be ironed out and a swap to unreal engine 5 was not timely or realistic.

The general feedback was that is a simple but nice game and well-scoped. The simplicity was pointed out, and that of course everything could be made more advanced, with animations and more cat-like abilities such as climbing, different surface behave differently if we had time and animation specialists.

Having the checkpoints placed out and avoiding too many vertical jumps, since that is not technically something we could achieve in our limited available development time, is something that I could have done sooner.

Being ahead of schedule can save your butt, losing half the team for nearly a week due to covid, would have hit our game project really hard.

Luckily we scoped our game to be fairly modular and we were doing well for time, but having as much contingency plan b and c outlined is important.