Foot Chinko: level design and game flow

/1 Comment/in , , /by

Foot Chinko, our casual approach to football (soccer) games, has the biggest amount of levels ever seen on a Ravalmatic game (+90 levels). Editing them was a major effort per se, but then, arranging them properly wasn’t either a simple task. Without no particular literature about this specific stuff, here’s how we figured we could handle the task.

Foot Chinko level design

When you do level design it is key to have a tool that is visual and fast to use. The agility you have when building and testing the levels is very important to produce good stuff. If the task is a heavy and time consuming burden, the levels will consequently be designed in less iterations. That’s what happened in previous games of the studio resulting in more plain level design or an exaggerated amount of time invested on the task.

Enriqueto, had already used the Flash IDE as a visual level design layout that could be later parsed into data about items, their location and contextual level data (seconds, type of goalkeeper, etc.). Testing those levels was as easy as exporting the Shockwave file, running a json exporter, and testing the game on the browser.

Foot Chinko editing tools

Ivan then edited a huge amount of levels in several iterations, discarding some of them due to technical limitations, and getting the most out of sketched ideas and emerging game mechanics. Some of Foot Chinko’s levels felt more skill-demanding and some other had a more random development, but the general idea was to keep a wide variety of levels, offering contrasted flavors. While a random level could be more appealing for a casual player, as the game progressed, those levels should be gradually replaced by more technical ones. If the resolution of an advanced match was just in the hands of luck, the more experienced players could get frustrated. Speaking about Foot Chinko‘s difficulty, it’s really hard to keep objectivity, since your skills will probably be above the average user, so try to make some early testing during this stage of the level design process.

Finally, we printed cards of every single level we had. That helped us to have an overall look, and making groups of levels (passive/interactive, slow/dynamic, easy/hard) and then arranging them alternatively, considering the general difficulty progression during the whole game and the partial difficulty progression of each tournament. Placing the cards on sticky panels was really useful to identify visual patterns and also make agile tweaks. The final step is testing that level progression with players. With the help of metrics we’ll be able to notice if there are some particular tough levels that break the natural progression of the game.

panels featuring all levels in Foot Chinko(The plants had strong arguments about the game flow, but the plastic one showed a deeper analytic vision)  

There are probably better ways to deal with level designing and arranging, so we would be glad to hear your suggestions. Take care!

Producing game soundtracks

/0 Comments/in , , /by

In this article we’ll cover the producing of game soundtracks and how to guide composers so their tracks fit your game and communicate important aspects.

In this occasion, Daniel Ara, helped us to create the OST of Pocahontas Slots, a light casual approach to slot machines with an indian flavour.

At this early stage you should focus on general aspects like music genre (something that fits your theme), tempo (that matches with the game pace), and duration of the track (in this case we are working on an HTML5 game, so we had to keep the main track below a minute in order to keep short preloading times).

Here’s what Daniel came up with as one of the firsts drafts. One of the other two was eventually used as a secondary track for Bonus Rounds. The other draft had a too dark, ominous spirit, so it didn’t match the game tone.

One of the cool things we found here was the ambient landscape using nature sounds. This is something to always keep in consideration. These kind of ambience sounds will reinforce the projection of the world in your game.
Although the composition was a cool draft, it needed a second iteration with a more casual and lighter ambience.

By the use of piccolo (tiny flute) in addition to indian flute, we not only gave the composition a happier feeeling, but also joined the two colliding cultures of the game: the american indians and the european settlers. Besides that, the low rank frequency of the indian drums that created a constant noise was also reduced.
So we definitely had the indian atmosphere, but still there was a music layer missing. The art, the ambience, the game itself, is a pop revision of the story of Pocahontas, so the music should also remind the casual approach to the theme by using a videogamey accompanying melody. An artificial sound opposing the organic instruments performing in the tune that also gave an even happier feeling.

And finally this is the final version of Pocahontas Slots soundtrack. A positive track that resounds like both indian and the settlers musical compositions (broad commonplaces), with a dynamic tempo, a semi-hypnotic pace, and a videogame touch which reminds that there’s no intention to deliver a pretentious or historically accurate composition.

I hope you enjoy Daniel Ara‘s work and appreciate the process which leads to a soundtrack that matches your game needs.