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Foot Chinko: level design and game flow

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!

Chorizos de España

This new entry makes more sense to be written in spanish, so here we go…

Conoce al hombre detrás del mito. ¡El genio de la evasión de capital! …mmm… no hablo de Pepiño, ni de Iñaki, ni de Fabra, ni de Griñán, ni de Oriol, ni de Millet, ni de Guerrero, ni de Sepúlveda, ni de Chaves, ni de Rato, ni de Correa, ni de Guerra, ni de Roldán, ni de Conde, ni de De La Rosa, ni de Botín ¡¡ni siquiera del Dioni!! Hablamos ahora de Bárcenas, y hablamos del saqueo masivo de un país tan grande y generoso que puede permitirse muchos de estos personajes. ¡Incluso diría que muchos más!
Estamos ante un panorama desolador, estamos viendo el impune desfile de: CHORIZOS DE ESPAÑA (y olé).

En próximos capítulos (actualizaciones) podrás meterte en la piel de otros presuntos mangutas, pero ahora es el momento de ayudar a Luis Bárcenas a trasladar su fortuna a las oficinas de Lombard-Odier en Ginebra, Suiza. No sabemos en qué planea gastarse todo ese dinero, si en crear un satélite artificial de confetti concentrado, o formar un ejército personal de clones de Cristiano Ronaldo. No nos incumbe. Allá cada cual con sus vicios, sólo importa que necesita nuestra ayuda y no se la podemos negar.

Recorre los paisajes de la azotada meseta española. Haz turismo por aeropuertos fantasma, obras faraónicas muertas de risa, hospitales masacrados y traslada toda tu fortuna sin perder ni un céntimo por el camino. Aquí no encontrarás enemigos que se interpongan, (alfombra roja para el emprendedor) sólo estáis tú, tu pastuqui, y tu pericia. Y qué mejor manera de realizar este maravilloso periplo que hacerlo a ritmo de pasodoble de organillo.
Siente el cierzo en las patillas, el olor de los billetes de 500, el ritmo pachanguero del Casiotone y embárcate en esta aventura fiscal. ¡Al fin, la corrupción está al alcance de pobres como nosotros!

Ayer, en pleno brote psicótico, los esforzados miembros de Ravalmatic subimos la primera versión de Chorizos de España a Google Play para poder ser descargado en móviles y tabletas Android. Próximamente se publicará también la versión iOS. ¡Os mantendremos informados!

Angry Bee

This is our first serious attempt on physics games. Basically, we wanted to create an aiming game because that was a clear and feasible concept to start from. Once we got the “cannon” working, we realized how interesting the performance of hexagonal cells was. It could just have been a simple skill game, but with some tweaks here and there, we came to a nice mixture of skill and puzzle game. Some of the levels are really tricky. I dare you to beat them all!

This game was kindly sponsored by Games1.com.

Curiosities: the main character of this game is actually a wasp, not a bee. Maybe someday there’ll be a prequel which tells us about the whole story behind him. […] If there’s a “Bloons 17 Hanukkah Edition Director’s cut”, there should be room for the rest of us!
Curiosities 2: This is our first games that has a video review! (Only for german speakers).

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