Sweet Thieves

While I had to juggle every design role in this project, one of the biggest tasks I had was creating one of the two maps for the game. Sweet Thieves came with it’s own unique level design problems to solve. Mainly because the game is a 4 player competitive party game, meaning that I needed the map to have a degree of balance and symmetry across it’s 4 way split, while also making sure the map was fun, let the mechanics shine through and also looked natural to the setting/theme.

It all started with paper sketches and a paper prototype. Being that the game/map was going to take place in one screen, meaning that the entire map/level could be seen by all players at once on one screen, this meant paper sketches were very effective at coming up with rough ideas and brainstorming quickly.

 L-Evolution

After brainstorming with paper sketches and playing around with ProBuilder in Unity, I came to the conclusion that my current map design was not allowing the player’s to fully utilise the main mechanic of the game, which was the many different uses of the chameleon tongues. The player can shoot out their tongue and it will fly towards where you have aimed, with no limit to its range. With the tongue players can collect pancakes from far away, steal pancakes out of other player’s hands, pull other player’s towards them, pull themselves towards any object they latch onto and even trip other players over by holding their tongue out and using it as a tripwire. To really let the tongue mechanic shine through, I needed to focus on making long corridors all around the map, with long pathways representing the main paths but also shorter pathways that acted as a way for players to avoid getting hit by other chameleon’s tongues. In the end I feel I was really able to hit that good middle ground of map balance and symmetry, while also giving the player room and space to fully utilise all the mechanics available to them.