Devlog #5: Level Design and UI Progress

For the past two weeks I’ve been finishing up the level design push and starting to work on the game’s main menu.

In an earlier entry I talked about some of the level design concepts I was applying for making fun capture the flag and one-ball maps. After some further playtesting, we realized that it would be difficult to design a map that worked well for both capture the flag and one ball.

We were analyzing Donut, a blocked out map that’s been consistently fun for capture the flag, a mode which we previously thought might just be too boring to ship. It was also a little less fun when playing one ball, a mode which had made some of the older capture the flag maps more interesting. This meant that our mental model about what makes a fun map was not right, or was at least poorly defined.

Donut does a couple of key things:

• it has good sight lines, particularly from the spawn areas
• There are obstacles preventing you from bee-lining it from flag to flag
• Boost jumps make taking the perimeter paths viable
• The elliptical shape helps maintain momentum
• And lastly, it’s small!

These features make capture the flag games more fun. We noticed that when we have good information about the state of the game, our tactics are more interesting and less random or mundane. Having fast perimeter runs and a difficult bee-line means that there are more practical routes to take from flag to flag. Maintaining momentum keeps the pace of the game up and makes the chases more exciting.

These features don’t work so well for one ball. First, if the ball spawns in the middle of the map then the runs are already shorter than a capture the flag run by half. Additionally, you don’t have a fallback strategy in one ball if you can’t catch the carrier. In capture the flag, you can take the other team’s flag to prevent them from scoring. In one ball, your only option is to stop the carrier.

I had a few hypotheses about what kind of map features might be important for a fun one ball game:

• longer capture runs, because players just needed more time to locate and catch the carrier.
• Dynamic spawning behavior so that players respawned closer to the action rather than in static positions
• Good sightlines from a team’s spawn area to its goal, so they can clearly see the last leg of the opposition’s run. This also increases the tension for the carrier.
• A totally different layout: i thought one ball maps might be better if they took the shape of a triangle, where each vertex is either the ball’s spawn point or a team’s goal.

Our first playtest with this experimental layout was a lot more fun. The triangle shape worked well. Resets after a goal brought everyone back to a neutral position, dynamic spawning helped balance chasing, and turnovers were exciting and moved the chase run to a different area of the level.

There’s definitely more to learn here and a lot of fine tuning to do, but the new layout feels promising. And it’s a big relief to be able to design maps for a single game mode.

The other thing I’ve been working on recently is the game’s title screen and main menu. This is very much a work in progress and will change a lot, but the general layout is more or less there. Kalimpong is most fun when you play with people you know, so the main menu’s top priority is to show you your friends and let you party up and play with them. The 2nd priority is to just get you into a game. Maybe you don’t know anyone yet or none of your friends are online. In that case, it has to be easy to start playing. Everything else - customizing your vehicle, buying cosmetics, changing your settings - is the last priority. It has to be clear that you can do that stuff, but none of that stuff matters anyway if you’re not able to get into games and have fun with your friends.

In any case, I’m thinking that when the game loads, you’ll see this screen with just the vehicle and the title, and then the title will shrink and slide over to the corner and the menu UI will appear. 

That's it for now, thanks for reading.