Tropical Trouble is an arcade racing game set in a fictional world inspired by Sri Lanka. I worked on the level and audio design of the game. The goal was to deliver a vertical slice of the game inspired by reference games like Crash Team Racing and Mario Kart.
UE 4.27 Jira Project Management 13 Persons Team 8 Weeks
I joined this project at the end of the pre-production phase with the concept for the game made and most of the pipelines established. I worked on one of the two levels and delivered work following the established research teammates did, and I followed the pipelines, metrics, and guidelines that previous level designers put in place. I also implemented all audio in the game, bar the UI sounds and music. The level I worked on didn't go through the art pass due to lack of time and somewhat poor planning on our end, but I was happy with the results and the final gameplay.
Level Design Process
Research
As I joined this project in the middle of the production phase, research was already completed and gameplay and visual direction were set. I read through their documentation and talked with environment artists, and game designers to better familiarize myself with the project.
I also tried to understand the team dynamic, to make my joining as smooth as possible. Understanding how teammates communicate, and what works and what doesn't.
I started working on the Audio Asset list together with another audio designer. There were some features still undefined, but we drew up a decent document and worked from there.
Concepting
Went through famous locations and Google Maps of Sri Lanka and used pictures to paint over them and get a plethora of ideas to share with my team, and see which ones resonate with them the most to then use for the final concept.
My teammates (artists in particular) really loved the high jump and the bridge, and they advised me to use those two as the main landmarks in the level, so I proceeded to do that for the final concept.
Having the environment reference helped tremendously with ideation, and I replayed Crash Team Racing to remember the most memorable moments, as well as did some research on the most liked levels.
Despite the high-octane arcade racing game that we were making, I also tried to have moments of audio-visual respite, so the player isn't overwhelmed. After presenting my level concept, I received a great deal of feedback and immediately iterated upon it. I created a more concise level breakdown. Feedback from veteran players was helpful as I realized my level is far too open, with too many lines of sight that both sides could exploit.
Concept Breakdown & Grayboxing
Through my concept presentation I showed the breakdown of the level, involving my teammates' feedback they shared with me, and the excitement they showed for particular landmarks. I covered the sharpness of turns I did on the research of real-life racing tracks, as well as the angle of the road (banked turns), and how that applies to our vehicle and game. I followed the established guidelines for the levels that were designed before I joined, such as the time length of the level, width of roads, and quantity of biomes that artists said is possible.
The team made a level design pipeline that requires us, level designers, to give a level proposal to the team, who will give feedback and then go through green-light process. After showing my proposal and the final concept level one-pager, the team gave minor feedback regarding art and was very happy with my work. I started immediately grayboxing and applying the feedback I received.
We were having trouble with the vehicle as it was bouncing even on flat terrain, so while our programmers and game designers were trying to tackle that, I was testing my level with the last functional vehicle. I modified the final stretch of the track, to shorten the loop to maintain level design metrics, and to give that final drag-race feeling towards the end of the lap.
Iterating
Following the vehicle changes, programmers delivered a completely changed vehicle, and being so far in development we had to adapt to the changes. We tweaked it to match the pre-established metrics to the best of our abilities but it wasn't the same, so we had to just be quick on our feet as the deadline was nearing. We modified our tracks as that was less time-consuming than changing the vehicle, and this vehicle had a lesser turning speed but it had greater acceleration and maximum speed, so I accommodated this in my level (whilst maintaining the difficulty curve of the level) with less sharp and wider turns.
Audio Implementation
This was my first time implementing audio into the game, and I had a great deal to learn. The other Audio Designer taught me a great deal as he is more experienced, but I used a tutorial as a starting point for the vehicle sound that adapts based on speed and movement vector. From there I adapted the blueprint to our sounds, as we had a limited amount of audio assets.
I created sound cues for all the sounds and added modifiers such as randomizer, modulators, and the similar, to get as much as possible out of our limited sound assets.
The biggest struggle for me was the vehicle sound, which turned out quite well, and even though we had no speed boost sounds in the base vehicle engine sound, I was happy with the result. The teachers awarded this project with the "Best Audio" award.
Conclusion
While my level being cut from the game is always a disappointment, it made sense as it was out of scope to do a whole art pass on it with the resources we had. I received positive feedback on it and teachers, teammates and testers liked it. Nevertheless, this pushed me to dedicate myself more to audio design and I had great fun learning about it. I helped the team and expanded my knowledge of UE at the same time, learning the fundamentals of audio implementation.
Commentaires