Frozen Steel - VFS Team Project

Frozen Steel is a fast-paced single-player fixed side view, 2D platformer arena, PC game that takes place during a fictional earth’s ice age inhabited by an advanced society of penguins. The planet is being invaded by M.A.S, mutant alien seals that consumed all their resources from their home planet Mabaku and now are attempting to raid earth. During the chaos, a thought-to-be failed experiment codename M.A.R.C (Mechanically Advanced Retro Cyborg) , the penguin, rises and must bash the enemies back to their ships to destroy the invading fleet.

The game features a smooth penguin belly sliding movement, on impact damage through a head bash, and a powerful penguin mechanical slap. Moreover, Frozen Steel includes two types of terrain: ice and snow. The snow terrain allows the player to only run and slap, while ice allows sliding and the headbutt attack.

Throughout this project I had the opportunity to face multiple responsibilities:

• Led and mediated the team's discussions around the game’s core loop and overall game structure to have a clear idea of what was our desired outcome.

• Constantly updated documentation according to instructor feedback and relevant team decisions and discussions.

• Playtested milestone builds with fresh-pair of eyes testers, taking notes of relevant observations to discuss afterwards with the team and filter urgent and non-urgent feedback and balancing observations to implement later on.

• Agile whiteboxing inside Unity engine to iterate early on the game’s flow.

.Level Design: My design process started with some reference gathering. Our game was a 2D platformer arena and we established key references from the beginning such as, Celeste and Tower fall ascension. After analyzing the level layouts from the different games I grabbed pencil and paper and started sketching the first iterations, fig1 and fig2.

After prototyping the levels inside Unity an issue came up with the slopes and the belly slide movement. Long story short, the belly slide mechanic had some trouble dealing with complex slopes and I had to simplify the designs, fig3.

With this new simplified designs the mechanics started behaving as intended and I proceeded to prototype and polish inside Unity. Later in the development cycle I ended up designing a tutorial fig4, stage 1 fig5 and stage 2 fig6.

fig4

fig5

fig6

Takeaways and conclusion: The designs worked pretty well and adjusted properly to the game mechanics. Nevertheless, there is always space for improvement. I noticed that the side view design was a safe option, especially for the time constraints we had, but it felt a little bit flat and repetitive. If we had more time I would have played with the verticality of the design allowing the level to grow and look more like the first sketches, also this would have meant that the camera no longer needed to snap, but it would move freely instead similar to what Hollow Knight does. Lastly, this first approach to 2D Level Design allowed me to identify the importance of communicating early with the team about any ideas that you might have, in the end what makes a good level is iteration and feedback implementation.

Thanks for taking the time and reading through this process!