PROJECT DETAILS:
Genre : Co-op Party Game
Engine : Unity 3D
Platform : PC
Duration : 4 months
Team : 5 people
Purpose : Realize a game in 4 months in order to publish it on Steam.
Roles : Lead Level Designer, Game Designer, Project Manager
WHAT I'VE DONE:
- Organize production plans in week sprints.
- Design features of the core gameplay.
- Define learning and difficulty progression through levels of the game.
- Design three levels (Intentions, Paper LD, Blockout).
- Work on UI in game and feedback.
THE GAME:
Plunder’s Call is a Multiplayer Local Co-op Party Game in which you enroll a pirate crew in search of wealth in order to make a name for itself in piracy. From 2 to 4 players, sail the seas aboard your raft, piloted by your mad captain and loot everything you find on your way through the multiple territories where you will land, in order to become the future terror of the seas.
The game is composed of several levels, distributed in three biomes (The coast of the fishermen, The big city and The bay of the castaways). The islands that carry your path are full of treasures of all kinds that you will have to bring back to your raft to be able to count them among your acquired wealth. This will not be easy and you will have to cooperate in order to be as effective as possible.
STATE LEARNING:
Plunder's Call is a content game, there are many mechanics and environmental elements to interact with.
To onboard all this content, we have chosen to introduce some of our features progressively through the levels of our different biomes. This also has the advantage of gradually increasing the difficulty and diversity of the challenges.
To design the evolution of the difficulty and the learning of the different features, we used the State Learning method which allows us to have visibility on all the levels and allows us to draw graphs efficiently.
DESIGN A LEVEL:
=> Top-Down Layout (Paper LD).
Based on the previously established state learning, we knew in broad terms what the level to be designed should challenge and in what proportions the different features should be present. Each of our levels was designed in several parts, in several "rooms", in order to be able to distribute our different challenge intentions and thus avoid cognitive overload or misunderstanding of the players.
=> Scalling Top-Down Layout.
Once the Top-Down Layout is validated, it is scaled to our metrics. For this, we passed the paper LD on Illustrator using a grid with the same dimensions as those we had set in the engine. This also made it easier to integrate the level later on.
=> Blockout in Engine.
To produce the blockout of the level, we arranged the Scaling Top-Down Layout made earlier as a sprite in the engine by setting the sprite grid with the engine grid. We then used Probuilder and Progrid and SnapGrid to make the different blockouts which we then tested again and again until we got the result as close as possible to our expectations.
=> Set the camera movements.
The last step consists in setting up the camera movements throughout the level so that it can adapt to the different game spaces by displaying them entirely on the screen. This step was particularly long and technically challenging because the amount of information to be displayed on the screen was sometimes consequent.