Crash Landers
:Escape from earth
-Pitch:
Two aliens crash on the planet known as Earth. The planet is too dangerous and alien to these crash landers. So, they must get to the escape pod, get off this planet, and return home. The path back to the pod will be perilous, and the crash landers need to cooperate by solving puzzles and getting past various obstacles to ensure the escape from Earth.
-My Role on
CRASH LANDERS:
World, Narrative, Level, Mechanics, & Character Designer.
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-Project Details:
Platform: PC
Engine: Unity
Language: C#
Development time: 4 weeks
Team Size: 2 Designers, 2 Programmers, 2 Project Managers.
-World Design:
I wanted to create a game without a specific age group, so it had to be fun, colorful, and welcoming. I chose to tell the story through the game world rather than dialog or monolog. The atmosphere, colors, music, and playable characters played an important role.
Like any other game, it would start easy and get more challenging over time. However, I wanted the game world to reflect the same notion with more than just challenging the player mechanically. The game begins colorful and with uplifting music. As the players progress through the game, the world around them becomes mysterious over time, creating more tension and caution in the player.
-Narrative Design:
While the game didn't have a fully fleshed-out written story, I still needed to give the players a reason to play the game. That is where the crashing and wanting to escape came into play. It is a simple premise and a straightforward goal. The narrative was told through visual cues and not through text to make it more accessible and not to dedicate a team member to writing the dialog or monolog.
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From there, I talked to the team about what kind of challenges might be featured in the different zones the player would be traversing. As we worked on the assignment, we let the environment, game mechanics, and interactions between players tell the story.
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-Level Design:
I had not used Unity previously to this extent, so I was unsure where to begin level-wise. I knew I wanted the player to keep moving forward and not backtrack. So, with that in mind, I wanted to have a system that destroyed the level over time pushing players forward, and to avoid the confusion of where to head to. All of the levels had to be linear.
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I drew a path on paper to get into the headspace of how the level would work and where the players would encounter the puzzles. I continued by blocking the path out in Unity to get a sense of scale. After the scale and pathing seemed solid enough I added assets to finalize it visually. Once the path was done, I would copy the player 1 path and paste it as the path for player 2. With minor rearrangements of blocks on the player 2 path, it became a fully functional level for 2 players.
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I made various terrain blocks by kit-bashing asset packs that we had received from our school. These blocks would serve two purposes. One, it would make future-level making quick and modular. Two, it would allow a more organic crumbling of the level, an important part of how the players were encouraged to move forward.
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The plan was to create 3 levels in total. This being our team's first project the time management skills were slightly off so we ended up with 2 fully fleshed-out levels.
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Level 1 was where the player would be introduced to the game, so it had to be colorful and cheerful making the player excited for the upcoming journey. The music had to be happy too.
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Level 3 had to be a little bit more mysterious and scarier. I made it slightly less colorful and used the terrain to make the players more cautious. The fog obstructed some of the paths so the players had to slow down and look where to go, trees could be used to obscure players' vision for brief moments making the narrow paths a bit scarier to traverse.
-Mechanics Design:
Apart from basic movement, we were required to have puzzles and cooperative elements in the game. To achieve this we created a set of minigames that incorporated these elements with various difficulties. The minigames were small puzzles and the cooperation would come in the form of players needing to communicate with one another to solve these puzzles.
-Using Tools:
I wanted the players to work together, but not be able to interact on the same pathway together. So, I came up with the idea that the players have obstacles blocking their path. The only way to pass the obstacle is to destroy it. However, the tools required for clearing these obstacles are on the other player's path, so players have to throw tools back and forth to one another to clear the path ahead.
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An unintentional addition to this mechanic was that the tools could push players when thrown. We keep that to add more chaos to the game and communication between players.
-Simon says:
A mini-game of color where the player has to repeat the color pattern on the floor to let the other person pass on their path. Simple but effective. The player has to match the colors a few times, to avoid it being too easy.
This puzzle had 2 flaws. First, the player detection range was too large, so the player might trigger a color pad by walking too close to it.
The second one is that it is a color-based puzzle, therefor people with colorblindness might find it difficult. (The pattern lights up so there would still be a way to tell which platform to walk across, but it would make it difficult to dictate the pattern to the other player.)
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We minimized the collision trigger so players stopped triggering the color pads on accident.
We chose not to add symbols to the color pads, but rather focus on the function of other puzzles.
-Match pictures:
Each player has a set of stones on their side and each stone has a picture of an animal when flipped over. There are 2 of each animal and players must match all the animals before they are allowed to pass. Only 2 stones can be flipped at the same time. So players are encouraged to communicate to match animals among all stones presented to them.
-False Block:
Players have a limited amount of lives per level. When the players fall off the map too many times they have to restart the level. False Block is 3x3 small platforms, so a total of 9 terrain blocks. There is a path of solid blocks the rest are not solid and the player can fall through them. Both players 1 and 2 have the same pathway through these blocks. By throwing items or jumping on the blocks the player can see if they are solid and then let the other player know which blocks are safe or unsafe to navigate.
-Character Design:
We received the asset packs to use during this project. I had kit-bashed our terrain to make it more unique. However, it wasn't as easy to do it with the characters to make them fit in the world nor make them stand out.
The characters had to be familiar yet alien, with silly appeal yet lovable. The original thought was to take 2 penguins and make them more alien but the design didn't sit well with me.
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After a couple of sketches, I wanted to create unique characters using Blender. It was a gamble because I didn't have prior experience creating characters from scratch. In the end, it paid off. The gamble paid off.
