Laya’s Horizon

Worked as a Game Design Intern on Snowman’s flagship open world title.

Studio: Snowman

Publisher: Netflix Games

Position: Game Design Intern

Duration: 4 Months - Summer 2022

Game Trailer

What I did

• Level Design: Built exciting gameplay environments for new and existing types of gameplay

• Game Design: Designed revisions to existing gameplay types, including AI behaviour

• Prototyping: Personally created prototypes to test new design ideas and revisions

• Collaboration: Worked with tech team to bring advanced ideas from paper to finished products

Building An Open World

Coming onto the project later in development, my role on the project was to help build out the open world and design content to fill up the island. Here’s some of the cool things I built for the project!

Blue Triples

As part of the open world content, I created 100 “Blue Triples” to complete - short flight challenges where you must hit 3 checkpoints to be rewarded with a collectable. These short, intentionally designed experiences fit in well with the open world nature of the game, where the player can always find something fun to do on the mountain, even when not completing missions or goals.

In-Game Footage

Changes and Challenges

When I came onto the project, the concept and basic implementation of Blue Triples were already there, but they were very different from what they are now. They started out as a “better spark” where completing them would simply fill your energy, the source of your boost.

However, because they were supposed to be these micro-challenges, flight paths that are intentionally designed by the designers, they were often not useful for that original purpose as they would stray from race paths or were usually just not the fastest route to a destination. This disconnect between their reward and their placement pushed me to pitch the idea of turning them into collectables. By having them be collectables (a reward that persists outside of just the current flight), the Blue Triples could become a source of content on their own, pushing players to explore more of the open-world and to try fun flight paths that they might not have otherwise tried.

Visualization Tool

While building the 100 Blue Triple chains, it was important for me to optimize my workflow as to complete the work in a timely manner. One way I did so was developing a custom tool that visualizes the flight path and flight time between each of the checkpoints. This is was crucial in my ability to quickly create paths and ensure they are playable and engaging even before testing. The tool draws a line between each of the checkpoints, color coded by how comfortable the flight will be for the player.

• Green Line: Means it is going to be very comfortable and easy for all players

• Yellow Line: Means it might require more agility from the player to react

• Red Line: Means it is too far and likely too easy / not engaging

• Magenta Line: Means it is too close to the previous checkpoints to be comfortable for most players

The distance thresholds for each color change were calculated based on the base flight speed of the player and how long it would take to travel the distance to the next checkpoint.

Spark Run Missions

I also became responsible for the Spark Run missions, where you must fly to a target destination while collecting enough sparks to meet the completion requirement. This mission type offers a different experience to the others (races and follows) as it forces you to devise your own route through the mountain while still engaging with the exhilarating trick system.

In-Game Footage

Changes and Challenges

The identity of these missions changed a lot during my time on the project. They were initially meant to be exploration-based challenges, where a photo was given to the player and their challenge was to find that location and fly to it. This created a unique experience, but it was frustrating for many new players who didn’t know the island yet, blindly searching until they saw the ping from the finish zone.

This pushed me to prototype a “big ping” effect that would serve to help players locate the direction of the location. Armed with this new information about where exactly the end point was in the world, players were more confident in their flight and their attention switched from trying to find a location to trying to find the fastest flight path to that location. We felt that this direction for the missions made for a better experience, and so we pushed it further. We removed the preview image and pivoted into showing the location via a UI element and a preview camera, which is where the missions are at now!

However, this brought with it new challenges, as the goal of just trying to get to a location would often have players effortlessly gliding high above the terrain, out of danger, which made for a less engaging experience. This forced us to experiment with ideas including a target time, but that idea was discarded as it felt like it created too similar of an experience to the race missions. The final design ended up as a “trick attack” style mission where the goal is to collect enough sparks from tricks to pass the mission. However, I also experimented with the nuance of tiered targets - having a minimum target needed to complete the mission, and a higher target to aim for. This ensured that players of all skill level would find this mission type engaging as they could essentially set their own difficulty level by aiming for a different target.

Preview Camera

Designing the path for the preview camera was an unexpected design challenge I needed to overcome for the Spark Run missions. Because of the exploration focus of the mission, we didn’t want the preview camera to “give away” the route to the destination. My focus for the preview camera was to have it effectively communicate the location of the end point within the world and relative to your starting position. This resulted in a preview camera that starts close up to the end point, and then zooms out going high up to show the location within the world, and then moving over to the starting location of the mission, showing the general direction you will need to fly in.

Path Planning

Because of the open-ended nature of the missions, it was important for me to ensure that the most common paths that would be taken to each location were interesting and engaging. To do this, I planned which end points would suit which mission start location based on the paths that would be taken to get there.

Dashwings

The Dashwings - birds you can chase and catch - are another type of open world content I designed that serve to make the world feel more alive and offer yet another gameplay experience different from any missions. The unique challenge of “chase” rather than “race” or “follow” brought with it various difficulties in pursuit of a new gameplay context.

In-Game Footage

Changes and Challenges

The first challenge with the birds came when I first took over the responsibility of them. The birds were originally always travelling along a chase path down the mountain and would simply speed up when the player started chasing them. This initial version brought the chase gameplay to life, but were frustrating to players for a few reasons. The biggest being that they weren’t in a consistent location.

Consistent Location

The birds were almost always supposed to serve a collectable, another piece of content to experience around the open world, but the fact that each bird could be anywhere along it’s path down the mountain at any given time made it frustrating if searching for a particular bird. The chases also often felt underwhelming as if you approached the birds with a lot of speed, they would be caught almost immediately. These issues pushed me to start my collaboration with a developer to bring the Dashwings to life.

Patrol Paths

The first thing we tackled was patrol paths, where the birds would circle, calling out to you to chase them. Once the chase had started, the bird would transition to its chase path, pulling you along an interesting route down the mountain. Outside of giving the birds a consistent location, this also made the chases feel like a more fulfilling experience where I as the designer can ensure they will get a full route down the mountain, rather than experience only half of the path because they started chasing the bird halfway down the mountain.

AI Behaviour

To further create this fulfilling experience, I worked with a developer on revisions to the AI behaviour, the most important being nosedives and rubber banding. Having the birds get the same speed as the player when diving became crucial to ensure that the birds could keep in front of the player during steep sections of the mountain. However this also brought with it new challenges as the birds would often pick up too much speed and lose control, straying from their path and creating a frustrating experience. This took a lot of tuning to get just right and find the balance between speed and control.

Rubber banding - having the birds go faster the closer you are - also helped to make the chase more engaging. By slowing down when they’re farther away, it would allow the player to catch back up, bringing them back into the flow state of just on the edge of catching the bird.

And to ensure the chase almost always ended up with the player winning if they managed to keep up with the bird, we developed a system that slows the bird down the further along their path they are, exponentially.

All of these changes resulted in the AI trying to keep just in front of the player until they chased them for a meaningful distance, where the bird would become easier and easier to catch. This continued the game’s focus of being comfortable for players of all skill levels, where newer players would still be able to catch the birds at the tradeoff of time, wheras experienced players would be able to catch the birds earlier at a higher difficulty.

Density Planning

To ensure I was effectively distributing the Dashwings throughout the open world, I tracked every bird’s location on a top-down view of the island. This allowed me to quickly find areas that needed more content, or others that might feel too dense. Color coding the patrol and chase paths also helped me to understand the density of birds around the island and the similarity of their chase paths seperately.

Open World Level Design

For each of these gameplay types, I needed to design new gameplay environments that both meet the requirements for that gameplay type, while still being versatile enough to be fun during general open world flight.

Take Aways

• Experienced coming onto a large project mid-way through development

• Developed and practiced crucial communication skills, especially visual communication

• Designed smaller systems meant to fit into a larger experience, which taught me a lot about designing on large projects