PAU RUANO
LEVEL DESIGNER
ROBO-FIN: LITTLE ADVENTURE'S
Robo-Fin is a 3D platform game with metroidvana touches that I made together with some colleagues for the Spanish GameJam called Indie Space jam. In it you play Robo-Fin, a little robot that has suffered an accident on a small planet and to get out of it you must collect all the pieces of his ship, which have been scattered around the planet because of the accident.
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Engine: Unity
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Duration: 7 days
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Game Jam theme: Night falls
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Role: Game and Level Designer
RESPONSABILITIES
CONTENT DESIGN
Design, implementation and balancing of almost all game content in conjunction with Ariel Valera and overseeing its development as producer throughout the project.
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Level design of several areas arround de map
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Design of the game pace and flow
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Design of the character's skills, including how they work within the game using tools created by Guillem Llovera
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Design of the rewards system as well as the placement of all the parts.
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Character progression design
UI DESIGN
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Research and study of some interfaces that reflect the idea of the game.
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Creating the interface using Figma
OTHERS RESPONSABILITIES
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Documentation
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Comunicating and sprint plans
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Balancing in game
HIGHLIGHTS
OBJECTIVE
Create a video game in seven days in which the gameplay shows the essence of the GameJam theme "Night falls".
CHALLENGES
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To apply a decisive element related to the theme of the Jam to the gameplay.
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Guide the player through a completely open spherical world so that he/she does not get lost in it with Player Guidance elements.
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Control what challenges the player can and cannot overcome at each point of his game with the obtainable upgrades and create alternative routes so that he does not run out of goals to achieve.
PROBLEM 1
How to implement the "Night falls" theme mechanically in the game to make it a decisive element of the player experience?
SOLUTIONS
To achieve this goal we chose to create a day and night cycle on a small "Le Petit Prince" style planet in which the player must try at all costs to stay on the illuminated side of the planet in order to get solar energy and keep moving.
This playable loop forces the player to be in constant motion, forcing him to keep moving forward and explore the world. In case the player stays on the dark side of the planet, he/she will progressively lose all energy and the protagonist will shut down, forcing the player to wait for the sun to rise again, thus having to avoid the "night falls".
PROBLEM 2
How to guide the player in an open spherical world so that he/she does not constantly get lost and is constantly heading towards the places we want?
SOLUTIONS
To prevent the player from getting lost, we decided to place two fixed landmarks, one in each emitter of the planet. This way the player would always know that he was going in the right direction if he left each of them on one side of his path.
Other Player Guidance elements such as negative and positive affordance, openings, leading lines, piching and breadcrumbs were also used using the materials to be collected around the world.
PROBLEM 3
How do you control what the player can and cannot achieve during gameplay to maintain a sense of progression so that the player cannot immediately pass the game?
SOLUTIONS
To solve this issue we use the main mechanic of the sun's rotation to our advantage. Since the player will want to continually stay within the illuminated range of the planet, we made the challenges ordered.
Exemplifying this we made it so that after getting the dash came an area that was only accessible with the dash. After getting the dash a zone that was necessary to overcome it.
However this solution created another problem, what happened if the player didn't manage to get the dash in time, got caught in the night and kept on walking? To avoid that in this case the player would simply be forced to walk around the planet until he could get the dash again, we created sub-zones that could only be accessed by jumping and we created easier paths so that they could be done in several laps and so that there was always something to do.
The game is avaiable in Itch.io!
