Role:
Game designer
Worked on lvl design & 3C,
Design vision,
and team communication
with a focus on playtests.
Team:
Programmer: François Candella
Graphic designer: Raoul Desmarest
2D Artist: Valérie Galchynska
Sound designer: Robin Cugniet
Project Manager: Mathieu Renard
UX Designer: Antoine Danielou
An eye-tracker arcade game:
- Daring pitch: Little to no input, for a spectacular arcade game!
- A new way to play that you can discover in a safe environment.
- Soft head movements to move the character.
- Surprisingly precise eye inputs to use the grapple-hook.
- A "spiderman" feeling.
- Fluid experience with no respawn, through level design.
Unique controls:
Patin grappin is an ice-skating game where you can use a grapple hook on any object in order to throw yourself in the air and get more speed.
You can aim at an object (on a precise point) just by looking at it. The only button input let the player trigger the grapple.
You can move around by slightly moving your head from left to right. We wanted to have a physical input for the movement so that the player won't forget they're playing with their eyes as well.
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I designed head movement and eyes input to be a great input combo, with the head moving the camera as well. That way, the player can adjust both the object's screen position and their pointer's screen position at the same time, to align their eyes' gaze on objects easily.
It required lots of playtests to be sure that having two complex interrections would not make people too confused. Making tutorial was laborious because of that: we needed to be sure that everyone understood how the game works.
The camera for this game was especially hard to design, as it's linked to the head-control, and has a huge impact on what the eyes can see. It was tricky to ballance while discovering how eyes work day by day.
Deal with all players:
Most players who will play patin grappin are not used to the eye tracking technology: Because of that, we needed the player to experiment with the mechanics in a safe environment. But at the same time, we wanted the game to be a competitive and fun arcade game to master.
To achieve that, I designed a system that allows the player to fail: The surfaces the player glides on are suspended in the sky, and if the player fall from this platform, they will land on another: there's no way to fail. It gives a unique identity to the game. It does not erase completely the feeling of failure for all players, but it does reduce it a lot.
With this system, everyone can enjoy the game at their first try, even non-gamers. At the end of the first race, several scores are given to the player: The time it took to finish, and the amount of time spent in the air.
It makes the players who are interrested in hard challenge and competition to give their best to show their scores on the leaderboard. Having two scores that reward two ways of playing the game is great because it gives the oportunity to several kind of players to show their skills.
Level Designing for patin grappin.
This game was a big level design challenge for several reasons.
The player has little to no control on their speed. This means the they can be easily frustrated if the game doesn't let them figure out the controls.
The contols themselves are very new for the player, so there's higher chances that the player will take a bit of time to figure out the controls.
I adressed these issues by putting a short tutorial, with small text explaination at the beggining of them for each mechanic (moving around with the head. - Grappling with the eye. - Boost activation by looking at the collectible.)
The tutorial levels force the player to use a specific mechanic. If the player fall, they will fall for a few seconds and land at the beggining of the same level, until completion. That way, the players learn about the "respawn" feature before the actual game begins.
For the actual game unique level (what we called "arcade mode", I designed a tentacular level design with lots of branching. It keeps the player interested as there's lots of choices going on, and allows me to challenge different skills depending on the path chosen. If the player fall, they will land on another branch. If the player fall several times on the same kind of challenge, I will make sure they land on a path that ask for a different one (If they are having a hard time grappling around, I'll chose a path where there's the road is larger, with objects
Here's what the whole level looks like:
You may notice there are several begginings to the branching (on the left), that's because if the player falls right at the beggining, I don't want them to feel like they land "at the beggining of the game", they will land at a totally new beggining (and an easier one, too).
I tried to design my areas to be explorable in multiple ways. An obstacle you encounter on one path will become an handy grappling point in another path below:
If you fall here, you might recover easily by grappling to get back on the track below. Mixing areas where you can land on another part of the level directly inside the level design was also a good trick to avoid the "respawn by falling and landing" feature being "visible" and feel too systemic for the player. Sometimes they will recover themselves by landing on some other part of the level, sometimes they will fall for real but we'll make them land elsewhere.
In the end the goal of the level design was to make sure everybody would finish the level. The non-punitive respawn system sure helped, but to make it less frustrative, having a level design that adapts to the player's skill lead to pretty cool result. Making sure that you often have choices on your path that will challenge the player in different ways was also good to make the player feel in control of the experience.
It was also important to make it visible that the other parth would lead to other experiences, to show the replayability potential to the players..
