I’ve worked on this game during my internship at Mando Productions.
I was mainly Level Designer on this project. When I’ve join the team, the Game Design was done, and the method to make the levels was defined.
My work was to create all the little parts that composed the levels, and to define which parts can or cannot appear on the different levels.
I needed to assign a difficulty value for each part. But it was clear for me that my perception of the difficulty would vary from the beginning to the end of my « parts creation ». So I’ve decided to work on a tool, based on Rational Level Design, in order to get an impartial value and to get coherent values from a designer to another, if any other Level Designer would work on it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to put more time into it, so it is very simple and can be highly improve on different aspects.
This tool was a solution to a quick need, and I had just a little time to think it, create and adjust it.
The game was made with Unity 3D, so it was pretty easy for me to work with the level editor made by the programmer, in addition, I made some scripts to help me doing some repetitive works.
During the last month of my internship, we needed to make some playtest in order to balance our levels.
I’ve proposed a template made with Google Spreadsheet to collect and analyze the data from our testers.
So each tester save his name and his experience of the game (is he a new player or did he plays it for the last 2 months), then play. At the end of his session, he can access to some data in the game thanks to a console mode made by the programmer, and he needs to put all these data into the Google Document, in the place corresponding to the actual build of the game.
Then the spreadsheet calculate all the values that interests us.
I like working on spreadsheet and data, so I’ve made a special place in the document where you can select 2 results to compare them. I thought that it could be really interesting, to see if the changes are working from a build to another.
Of course, that was just a part of my internship, but it was very interesting to propose some methods and tools.
I think that the biggest point of my internship was autonomy, because my Lead was very busy on all the other projects of the studio, and this project was not a high priority at the moment of my internship. So I was nearly the only one working on it, reporting my works to the Lead Designer.