My Contributions

Overview

I worked with three others on this game for our final year capstone project in university. As the lead designer my main aim for this game has been to ensure a fun and engaging experience for players. While I vision for the game has changed over time its core feature has remained the same. You cannot walk. You must swing your sword to move. While we fell this is the main selling point of the game, its also the main challenge. Careful consideration is needed to keep this unique experience while trying to make it accessible to many players. 

System Design

We experimented with several different mechanics and alternate control systems, but found a lot of these took away from the core experience or made movement more difficult. In the end being a party game making the main mechanic of spinning simple and easy, yet still leaving room to get skilled is the way to go.

Tutorial Design

The first step is teaching players how to move. Once learnt it allows for a lot of freedom, skill expression and emergent behaviours. However if they do not get it quick enough they will likely give up quickly. So the tutorial must be succinct and effective.

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Level Design

After this a good variety of levels with good design is vital for keeping players hooked to the game. Designing levels for this game has been a unique challenge. The placement of platforms and obstacles is largely dictated by the way moves as they spin. It must allow for them to flow through the level with just the right amount of resistance.

It is very easy for players to just spin their weapon and get stuck as they keep hitting a platform above which sends them back to where they were. However if you place that platform too high it becomes to hard to reach. When you consider there being 4 different weapons of different sizes and levels of manoeuvrability this becomes even more complex to balance.

Brainstorming

Designing levels for Little Knight started off with brainstorming. I drew potential shapes that could be interesting to move around, or interesting settings.

Sketching

Than referencing these brainstormed ideas I draw out a sketch of the level and work out where certain gameplay features go. In this case the yellow dot indicate player spawn points and the orange dots are where collectable tokens spawn. As the collection game mode became solidified it became clear that the token locations had to be distinct from player spawn points to prevent players from spawning on tokens.

An important feature of this design are the table legs which are in the foreground and can obstruct the view of the knights. Other than this the level is very simple when broken down into basic shapes and lines.

Whiteboxing

Next is white boxing the level so it can actually be tested in the game. Players often got caught on the stool platforms and them being so thin made it hard to jump off them. While you can learn to move around these challenges, it is important to consider the purpose of the level when evaluating it. This level was intended as the second level new players would go into to, where they would learn how to dash. This amplified the flaws in the level. It was very hard for new players to reach the top platform which resulted in a frustrating experience.

Playtesting and Adjusting

To address these problems and in response to a shift towards reusing as many assets as we can I made this new level. The ingot stacks help players climb onto the boxes which is a lot easier than trying to jump onto a platform. Having this first step be easier, alleviates a lot of the frustration caused by falling when trying to get on the platform

Finding a Faster Process

With this limitation of reusing assets and the important testing needed to validate designs I've now found skipping the first steps of this design process to be much easier. I am now using previous brainstorms and other things for inspiration as I move around platforms and test different configurations for appearance and experience.

Quality over Quantity

A nice example of this process is the level to the left. I started with an idea of having a single pit in the middle. But needing a way to climb out I pulled some of the ingots out of the towers to form platforms. Than referencing our determined level considerations, there needed to be an alternate path besides up to get out of this pit. So I added gaps at the bottom of the towers to pass through. While this design had changed a lot from a pit to these two towers of ingots, it is visually interesting and provides a unique experience.

After testing this level was cut due to the difficulty of the tunnels. While the level is still enjoyable it is not as strong as other levels, which we have chosen to focus on making better.

Final Polish

To finish