Game / Level Designer
As my final project as a student at Vancouver Film School (VFS), we developed Kodos in a group of four. A 2.5D coop adventure platformer with a cartoony looking and a lot of charm.
It was a challenging process to design for coop play, since a lot of extra considerations need to be made when making a genuine coop game, being them the camera, the mutual progress, mutual rewards, lose condition and a lot more.
COOP DESIGN CHALLENGES
When designing for Kodos, i noticed it was never interesting to stop both players progress because of one player failure. If one player dies, the game should not punish both. By realizing that, it was created a rewpawn system that when dead, after a shot cooldown, the player would be able to respawn next to his partner, keeping the progress going. This respawn mechanic, reinforces cooperation, ensuring that players with different skill levels can still play together and also reinforces competition, making it able for one player to kill the other without getting punished and making both player have fun.
Respawn system
LEVEL DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
While designing the levels for Kodos, it was important that the minute to minute experience was enjoyable, but also the experience as a whole should feel good. To achieve that, it was a concern to keep the pacing balanced between intense platforming moments with enemies and environmental challenges and puzzle moments. A good balance between both would give some time for the player to breathe between the intense moments and would give some action after puzzles.
To find the right balance we looked at competitor games already in the market and how they solved this issue, by playing games like Little Big Planet and Super Mario, i could have a better understanding on how this balance could be made. After a lot of testing and iterating, a good pacing for the game would be to use simple puzzles and a lot more challenging platforming moments.
For the Puzzles, i designed simple situations with multiple solutions so that the players could explore and learn with each other and with the game. The proposal was not to make extremely challenging puzzles that forces to stop platforming and think over a solution. It should be more of a moment to calm down and play with the environment, moving logs, projecting your partner up and enjoying the physics of the game. Every challenge, being platforming or puzzles, should reinforce multiplayer (being cooperation or competition).
TECHNICAL ASPECTS
In order to fasten the white boxing process and the iteration of the levels, i create a tileset for the game. While creating it, i had to ensure that the UVs and vertex were aligned, in order to make the gradient of the textures merge properly, and that the right variation of ramps and tiles to build the level were planned properly. To ensure that, i 1st tested a scene with unity blocks and the player characters, without any challenges beside platforming, simulating in scale, size and heights the environment the game would have. With enough tests done and the idea in mind, i made this tiles that could be used to make levels for the whole game.
Kodos Tileset
With the tileset done and in engine, it was time to start prototyping the first visual target of the game, otherwise, it could be a big headache in the future. After placing the tiles and some placeholder meshes, the game already looked visually promising, but the background still looked incomplete. The sky and the meshes wouldn`t merge properly. After studying solutions for it, the one that most pleases the public was to use depth of field and fog in the background, achieving the game visual target.
Kodos without post-processing
Kodos with post-processing
To make the levels lighter on performance, we also developed a loading system that would load and unload parts of the level on the fly. Every time a player would hit a specific marker placed manually, the system would load the next area and unload the previous area, making it only render what the player was currently playing.
Kodos loading system
CONCLUSION
After completing the project, I improved on designing games for coop, being able to giving the right pacing for the beats in a game. I also understood better the limits of a game engine and what should be done in order to complete a game with good performance.
It all was an amazing experience and it is a project that i am proud of being part of.
LAYOUT PLANS