UNANNOUNCED PROJECT
(NEXT LEVEL GAMES)
NOTE: While I’d love to share more information about my work at Next Level Games I am prohibited by NDA agreements.
Notable Achievements
Embraced learning a new (to me) proprietary Game Engine.
Successfully pitched and built ~20 Puzzles.
Successfully pitched 5 Creature and Enemy designs.
Successfully built ~8 Gameplay and Level Sandboxes.
Supported Progression, Economy, and Reward structure planning.
“Fin was extremely helpful in several different design areas and took on all challenges with a self-motivated and enthusiastic attitude.
For the Enemy and Player Mechanic designs that I oversaw he showed exceptional attention to detail and creativity in his initial drafts and was eager to receive actionable feedback.
In addition to his creative and craft skills, he is an easy person to get along with and is a great person for a joke or laugh to help lighten the occasionally stressful game development process. I’m sure he would be an excellent addition to any design team.”
Matt Smits, Lead Gameplay Designer @ Next Level Games
Gameplay & Logic Puzzles
A key priority for the Design team was to cast a wide net in the hunt for suitable Puzzles for our target demographic.
Puzzles would come in various forms from Environmental Puzzles, Platforming Puzzles or Logic Puzzles.
In the process of planning and building, I created a series of paper Puzzle designs following the ‘Hop, Skip, Jump’ Design philosophy which is a 3-step process:
(HOP) Easily allow players to solve a relatively simple problem using the game’s core mechanics.
(SKIP) Add a twist upon that original problem that increases the difficulty/complication.
(JUMP) Finally, add a final twist to a Puzzle that introduces a new emergent problem, and asks the player to use a combination of the core mechanics, either by a specific sequence or timing. The last and most difficult version of that Puzzle (while still being mindful of the target audience).
Each new Puzzle could serve one of the above steps, or in some cases was fleshed out enough to support all 3 sequentially.
Building Level Sandboxes
An area that I was encouraged to experiment with on this project was to create a variety of Levels in a grey box format following the process of:
Implementing ‘broad brushstrokes’ and beats of a level.
Utilizing significant Points of Interest / Landmarks to frame the level and reinforce player orientation and progression toward narrative goals.
Ensuring that player affordances and ‘no go’ areas are obvious so players clearly understand where they can and cannot go.
An area that I was encouraged to experiment with on this project was to create a variety of levels that would fulfill the following:
Construct levels that had consistent pacing and flow with preceding levels to ensure a smooth user experience for our target audience.
Find ways to make each new Level or Playspace interesting and fun for players.
Find ways to introduce Puzzles or Combat scenarios that feel new and fun.
Additionally, we would test our metrics with different Level structures, flow, and layouts to see where improvements to the User Experience could be made.
Once our Key Metrics were confirmed, this would allow for the wider Gameplay and Level teams to have certainty around what our possibilities and limitations were for constructing Gameplay Mechanics, Level building, and NPC behaviours.
Building Gameplay Sandboxes
This meant building out a series of different sandboxes to test against certain assumptions of what made the game fun.
Finding new and innovative ways to approach different gameplay scenarios, and enemy structuring to find problem areas, then to document those and flag any issues to the wider team and get support to address those issues.
Creature & Enemy Designs
One of my favourite design areas is Creature and Enemy design work. The balance of creating something novel, fun to engage with and that looks cool is always an exciting prospect.
My focus during this process was to:
Keep the design of each creature’s mechanics relatively simple to ensure players can grasp how a given Creature functions and react accordingly.
This has the added benefits of making the concept easier to communicate to the broader team and even to get them actively excited about the concept.
Once paper designs were approved, I would collaborate with the Animation and Engineering teams to ensure my proposal was feasible given any project constraints. Once any adjustments were made we would move on to prototyping; Animators would create a short animation scene communicating to our publishing partners how we envisioned the creature behaving.
Meanwhile, Engineers would help provide any additional support or custom work to get early phase iterations of the creature off the ground so we had something to iterate on.