Zoey and the magic paintbrush
Zoey and the magic paintbrush
Trailer
Circuit Slinger
Trailer
Game Info
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Shoot targets to the beat in 6 playable levels
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Two game modes, with 3 game-play options to tailor your experience
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3 different circuit-based reactive environments
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Supports both Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive
Development info
Role: Game Designer / Producer
Team Size: 10
Genre: VR Rhythm
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Development Time: 3 months
Game summary
Circuit Slinger is a VR rhythm game where players purge corrupted code to a beat. Grab a pair of guns and shoot your way through six levels of heart-pounding electronic music!
Roles and Responsibilities
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Acted as the Game Designer, keeping and communicating the design-vision for all aspects of development.
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Negotiated with stakeholders on milestone expectations and feature releases.
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Designed feedback mechanisms, and target conveyance requirements.
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Oversaw development of rhythm conveyance, and level logic.
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Developed testing standards for level implementation and level quality.
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Oversaw and co-designed VR comfortability requirements in product implementation.
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Acted as Primary Producer, producing product backlog, and implementing agile development schedule for team.
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Led and coordinated Team Leads in sprint planning and task execution.
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Designed and Organized specialized VR Demo spaces for testing and milestone presentations.
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Organized our Team Working Agreement, with an emphasis on professionalism and forward thinking goals.
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Oversaw initial development of Product Team pipelines, including iteration and reorganization as development evolved.
development sTORIES
Core Design of Circuit Slinger
In designing Circuit Slinger as a Rhythm game involving shooting, I felt it was important to break down fundamentally what player skills from both game types needed to be tested to present an interesting challenge for the player. Through rapid prototyping and research, I found that the two skills that tied the ideas best together were a combination of aiming and timing. However, it was important in which order I placed the emphasis, as the two gameplay skills can produce wildly different experiences. As my intent was to design a Rhythm game, rather than a shooter with rhythm elements, I opted to hold timing over aiming, primarily rewarding shooting objects at the proper time rather than merely whether the object was hit or not.
Hit window and conveyance design visualized
This decision to place timing over aiming was critical to the core design of Circuit Slinger, and fed directly into the player feedback and reward system. To reward timing as our central skill, I provided 3 different levels of reward based on how precise the player timed their hit to the beat of the music: Good, Great, and Perfect, increasing the earned points based on how precise the timing.. The window to hit the target was designed to be generous at the tail end of each beat to allow for slower reactions to still score some points and keep moving.
As aiming was the secondary skill to test, I designed the larger combo system to test this skill. As long as the player hit a target at all, the combo would be maintained, and a greater multiplier would accrue. Missing once, would result in the combo multiplier to be reset, and missing constantly would result in damaging the ship the player was on, resulting in a game over, though this damage could be healed back if the player began to hit targets once again.
The overall design goal of these systems in concert is to encourage the player to listen to the music to receive the proper timing for shooting their weapon, while still requiring the player to aim and shoot their guns across the screen. Because a Rhythm game is intended to produce a constant state of flow, in which the player wants to lose themselves in the action and music, it was important to ensure that we did not borrow too heavily from the accuracy requirement of aiming in our final gameplay. For this reason the target’s hitboxes are far larger than they appear, and several elements designed to encourage proper anticipation.
Target anticipation
One key element of a Rhythm game, is knowing when to properly hit a given target, and which target to hit based on the music’s sound. In a more conventional sense, a Rhythm game might employ arrows falling from a ceiling, or buttons travelling down a guitar fretboard. In each example, the different elements travel from a certain point, and cross a threshold at their perfect timing, using position to indicate the difference of the node themselves. Once the different elements of the music are identified through finite nodes and positions, the player can begin to predict positions, and anticipate where to hit.
Through experimentation, I found that targets moving towards the player tended to cause a player to want to smack a target with their Oculus controller rather than shoot at them, and causing targets to arrive from a fixed horizon point and then move around caused a break in rhythmic flow. I needed our targets to spawn in a consistent manner, and indicate their “threshold” without the targets crossing a given line in 3D space.
In order to achieve this, two systems were developed: our Guide Line, and the Shrinking Circle within the target animation.The Guide Line would lead the player across the screen towards the position of the next target, and the Shrinking Circle would indicate the proper time to hit the target, with the Ball at the end of the Guide Line striking the target in the center as the proper time hit. The combination of these two systems allowed for the player to predict where the target was likely to be, and allowed them to concentrate more readily on timing, as any level of inconsistency in conveyance could lead to breaking rhythmic flow.
Pictured: Guide Line with leading Ball
Pictured: Target Rings in succession.
After adding these two systems, we noticed players hitting the targets more accurately according to the beat, and losing themselves more often to the music, resulting in many play testers being quiet and focused during play sessions.
comfortability and vr design
Designing for a VR experience can oftentimes go beyond gameplay, into a new realm of managing the player experience in real life. As VR experiences are still relatively new to most players, one needs to take extra care not to make players sick or uncomfortable during the experience. While this phenomena often occurs in relation to movement controls, with Circuit Slinger I found that a combination of moving towards the horizon, and aliasing from thin lines, were causing players to become uncomfortable during our Alpha development phase.
Pictured: Alpha Background with aliasing.
Pictured: Release Background for Comparison
Short Video of Alpha Playthrough with Targets
In order to address the concern of player sickeness, I worked with our Art team to reorganize our playspace into a more static environment, ensuring a basic amount of room existed for the player to engage with targets, and more importantly, with nothing in the center playspace to distract the player from the Rhythm. While this required a considerable pivot in our aesthetic design, by creating a more static space with circuit based themes, we were able to achieve a far higher level of quality in the end, and resolve player sickness moving forward in development.
Lessons Learned
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Being a Game Designer requires one to keep the vision of the project coherent, and this can lead to having to manage diverse and often passionate team expectations.
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If the product needs something to be successful, campaign for that thing early and often, whether that be time or additional people.
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Virtual Reality is a new frontier, and one must pay special emphasis to comfortability, and user experience when designing any system or feature.
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Agile implementation is a fluid process, and can be customized to suit evolving needs through the guidance of team retrospectives. No process is set in stone.
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In order to best develop for Virtual Reality, developers need to frequently test their work in virtual space, and be provided a specialized environment to account for it.
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Being clear about requirements, and open to new solutions, can lead to even better outcomes.
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Working with a newer technology means that one cannot rely on a baseline level of user experience, and one must test frequently to ensure systems can bring all sorts of users to a common experience.
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The best way to serve a team in multiple roles, is to delegate responsibility and empower others.
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Sometimes there is no perfect solution. When things go wrong, be quick to assess the situation, come up with alternatives solutions, and be transparent with Stakeholders.