EFO: Escape from Outerworld

Escape from Outerworld

Systems Designer DigiPen Team of 11 January - December 2020

Level Designer Custom Engine

Overview

In the side scrolling platformer Escape from Outerworld, the scene is set as an alien has crash landed on a mountainous planet. You play as that alien and your task is to hightail it back to the spaceship before it blasts off without you. The time is short. You must use the main game mechanic, telekinesis, to move platforms into position to cross stages before your battery power runs out. Luckily, batteries are placed throughout the level to give you more time.

While most of our team was building a custom engine, I worked on prototyping the original version of the game in Unity and playtesting the gameplay concepts. Afterwards, most of my time was spent doing level design in Tiled. Additional challenges were posed for me as the level designer when the art team left the game halfway through the project. As a solution, I found ways to use the assets they had already produced in an aesthetically pleasing manner while translating the exciting experiences of the prototype to the new engine.

The game was made entirely in an online setting due to the Covid 19 pandemic by team Apricat, a DigiPen game team.

Skills Honed

Prototyping

Unity

C#

Level Design

UX

Team Communication

Systems Design

Custom Engine

Gameplay Design

My Contributions

Designed a 10-minute level for the final game.
Designed and fine-tuned the main character's telekinesis mechanic and movement physics to be intuitive and feel good.
Designed and produced a prototype to start playtesting while the custom engine was being built.
Influenced game design very early while the custom engine was being built.
Communicated ideas to other disciplines clearly and efficiently in a 100% online environment during Covid-19 pandemic.
Stepped up to place the art team's assets into the level in an aesthetically pleasing manner due to their untimely separation.
Conducted dozens of playtests, tallied results, and presented resulting data in a digestible fashion to advocate for project improvements.

Design Work

The biggest issue with the game's inherent mechanics was that players could repeatedly grab the same platform with their telekinesis, carry all platform copies through the level, and jump on them repeatedly to easily fly through levels with ease. This simple method of clearing levels trivialized all preplaced blocks.

Finetuning Telekinesis

Working with programmers

Since this game was created through a custom engine, any meaningful changes had to go through the programming team. To motivate these team members to make the changes I recognized as critical, I performed numerous playtests showing that people preferred cheating over actually playing the game.

Designing around limitations

Due to the art team leaving halfway through the project and being unable to produce new art assets, the number of new mechanics that could be added were very limited.

Once infinite flight was fixed, the problem remained that players could haul a block around with them wherever they wanted. To address this, I added more areas requiring multiple platforms to be carried and placed more emphasis on running out of time. This made it inconvenient to carry blocks around everywhere. I did not prevent them from carrying the blocks if they felt so inclined since a lot of players seemed to enjoy that, I just made it inefficient to do so. Adding multiple solutions increased player engagement.

Designing around an overpowered ability

Because telekinesis was so powerful, it was important to consider the many ways a player could tackle a level. My first intent was to limit the abuse of the ability as much as I could, but instead I started designing around it and accepted the game's mechanic for what it was.

Discouraging abuse of mechanics By introducing batteries, I was able to offer rewards for trying different options. I could encourage players to slow down and follow routes to pursue batteries, making them engage with the level design where they otherwise wouldn't. Level design created options for both the players who carried a block from a previous section as well as those who traveled without one. Carrying an extra block was actually rewarded rather than punished in some instances, while a plain linear path was offered to those who traveled lighter.

Prototyping

During the first 10 weeks, while our programmers met the project requirement of building a custom game engine, I launched into prototyping the game in Unity in order to start collecting feedback.

How my prototyping saved time Through the UX feedback I gathered, I was able to demonstrate many needed mechanics to the programmers. As I demonstrated the confusion of players who playtested the custom game engine version, I was able to convince the programmers to insert a feature to change the object color when it was about ready to drop. Level design concepts from the unity prototype were incorporated into the custom engine version as good starting points, with some of the problematic ideas already having been tested and removed during that phase. As the mechanics of the game were very basic, most of the basic layouts from the prototype were able to be carried over to the custom engine, saving valuable time.

Post Mortem

Things that went right:

Communication between disciplines was strong as we made efforts to talk to each other often and discern what we needed to do.
With the gameplay being as simple as it was, we were able to work on fine-tuning other aspects and had a healthy amount of time for bug fixing. I was able to make use of my extra time working on art related things since the art team left.
All departments produced good portfolio items in this project.

Due to the early departure of the artists, hazards that were originally planned as a second possibility for player failure had to be dropped. As a result the gameplay mechanics were not as fine-tuned for speed as they could have been. If we would have known what we had to work with from the beginning, momentum physics would have been a great addition.
Although the simplicity was beneficial in some ways and made for a smooth transition from unity prototype to custom game engine, it placed too many limitations on what the design team could make
for gameplay.

Set up work and communication pipelines between disciplines as strong as you can early in game development.
Be sure to articulate strong reasons to demonstrate changes you think need to be made in the project when communicating with other disciplines, no matter how obvious needed changes seem to you.

Things that went wrong:

What I've learned from this experience: