Project Type: Team Project
Length of Project: 5 Months
My Role: Lead Level Designer & Narrative Designer
Team Size: 10 People
Supported Platforms: PC, MacOS
Engine: Unity
Summery: Snapsquatch is a fast paced local-multiplayer arcade action game about taking amazing wildlife photos. You play as bigfoot, who is attempting to take good wildlife photos, so that others don't come out and discover them accidently. The game is heavily inspired by Overcooked, with a theme set in an area closely resembling Yellowstone national park.
My major responsibilities of the game were not only blocking out the level, but continuing to iterate on said level for the duration of the project, taking into account changes in mechanics and art. My secondary responsibility was coming up with the narrative for the game.
I also had the opportunity to develop this game under the mentorship of developers from Iron Galaxy, a game development studio out of Chicago, Illinois and Orlando, Florida.
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One of the major challenges I faced when iterating on the level was figuring out how to make the level feel much more alive, and less like an island floating in the void. This was one of the first concerns I had when I initially blocked out the level, starting with finding the correct size for the game that we were making. The first blockout was very much that, a blockout. I used this first pass to determine what the size and shape of the level would be overall, as well as what the major points of entry for the animals would be. In addition, the river at this time killed the player if they walked through it, so I had placed a geyser on either side, allowing the player to launch themselves over to gain access to the opposing side of the map. However, the level itself didn't feel much alive, as it still felt like just an island in the void.
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One of the biggest things that came up during the first round of playtesting was a lack of flow thorough the level, something that would plague me for most of the second and third sprints. Trying to achieve a good flow became one of the top priorities of my philosophy for the level. This was furthered by an addition of a bridge over the river, adding another path that encouraged players to explore either side of the map by giving them another means of crossing the river. This was a vast improvement not only to gameplay, but to making the game feel much more like an actual living play space. However, that still didn't solve the problem that it still was an island floating in the void.
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The solution I came up with was to expand the play space outside of the boarders of the level, so that even if the player can't reach those parts of the landscape, it gives off an illusion that there is much more outside the level, thus getting rid of the feeling that it's in the void. This I accomplished by expanding the ground past the boundaries, and adding cliff faces at various elevations, populating them with various trees and shrubs, to give off the idea that there is a much larger wilderness beyond the cliffs.
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As more assets were modeled and more textures added, the question became one of polishing the landscape that I had made, and continuing to polish the level that, at this point, was in a state that I felt comfortable enough moving on to the polishing stage. During this stage, much of my work went into the little details of applying textures to various surfaces, breaking up smooth sides and angles to allow the level to feel more natural, and going through the space and adding more variety to the size, type, and position of many of the assets within the play space. This allowed for the level, even though it was low poly, to have much more visible texture than just the coloring provided by the artists.