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Zoey and the magic paintbrush

Trailer

Game Info

  • Green and Red Paint, to roll and zoom across worlds!

  • Use Paint to find your own solution in each world.

  • Erase or modify your solutions with ease!

  • 12 fun puzzles to play with! Progress is saved to your tablet, so you can come back and play again!

  • Secret Challenge Stars exist in many levels, capture all of them to unlock a bonus!

Development info

Role: Level Designer / Producer

Team Size: 4

Genre: Puzzle

Engine: Unity 

Development Time: 7 weeks (200 man hrs)

Game summary

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Zoey and the Magic Paintbrush is a strategic, line-riding, puzzle game where players can help a magic princess unlock portals by painting lines with their fingers to collect gems. Players can paint Green-Lines to guide Zoey slowly across a level or stop her momentum, and Red-Lines to accelerate her over jumps or across the screen. 

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Managed three team members throughout the full development process, including acting as our team’s Scrum-Master.

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  • Designed and created the first seven levels of the project, including all tutorials and implementation of tutorial screens.

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  • Wrote and edited all in-game information text, including placement and implementation of our Help System.

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  • Co-designed all principle systems and mechanics, including Line-types, Pickups, and Scoring System.

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  • Developed the UI Design for the project.

development stories

Level Flow / Progression

As a Level-Designer for Zoey, I was tasked with thinking through how we would introduce abilities and escalate difficulty for the player as we progressed through the game. In order to best achieve this goal, I worked with my team to take stock of the main abilities we intended to introduce, and what specific things could be done with those abilities. My intent was to introduce those ideas to the player at a measured pace to balance new information with mastery of older information. Our progression table can be seen below.

Zoeylevelprog.jpg

A look at the Level Progression Table, with difficulty included.

In order to manage the workload of our intended 12 level scope, we split the taskload of level responsibility between myself and our other Level Designer Zhi. As the Designer responsible for the introductory levels, my goal was to ensure that every skill necessary to complete the more challenging later levels was simply and effectively taught to the Player in the levels I designed. 

I was happy to receive this responsibility, as working with another Level Designer forced me to develop a standard set of expectations each level had to meet, in order to ensure there was design cohesion throughout all levels. These level requirements proved very useful for providing guidance with our level flow and difficulty progression. A good example of these requirements would be the cap we have on Paint in a given level, as we found that providing too much of any one Paint communicated to the Player that the solution was more complicated than intended. 

For a deeper look into the Levels I created, click Level Details below.

Making it easy, but fun

Our target audience for Zoey were children Ages 6+, which meant we could not count on certain affordances or gameplay reasoning to necessarily be present in many of our Players. For this reason, we needed to ramp up difficulty very slowly, and take the time to visually teach our Players how to succeed in the game, especially in the beginning. One of the dangers we identified early with this slow-start strategy, was that the gameplay was at risk for becoming dull if we weren’t careful.

To counteract this problem, I suggested we provide an optional objective, Challenge Stars, to teach the player advanced uses of their Paint, or preview certain puzzles solutions that would be coming down the road. This provided a reason to go back and play certain levels even if beaten, and capturing them all unlocked a special costume for Zoey when beating the game. This addition to the gameplay was well-received by our playtesters and noticeably kept people playing longer.

wHAT IS AN ERASER?

One of the distinct challenges I ran into in designing the User Interface, was how to depict the Eraser feature visually. Initially we had used a Pink School Eraser, highlighting its use when active down on the Interaction Bar at the bottom of the screen. Players found that they did not notice that the feature was highlighted to indicate its use, but worse than that, many of our play-testers didn’t recognize that the Pink School Eraser was an eraser at all!
 

Further research concluded that Erasers have different shapes and expectations across the world, meaning could not count on what we felt was a common enough shape to get the job done. Paying special mind to this feedback, I worked with our Programmer and Artist to shift the design of the Eraser to a more universal Box Eraser, with Eraser written on the side to further reinforce this idea. Additionally we beefed up the conveyance of the Eraser mode, by not only providing a highlight around the button when selected and in use, but by greying out the play-space except for the Paint that could be erased. By substantially changing the play-space when in a new mode, we found Players more intuitively understood that they were in a new mode of play, and what could be impacted there. Additionally, we also found a substantial increase in persons who recognized the Eraser on sight among our target audience.

Lessons Learned

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  • How to develop games from the perspective of Agile Development with Scrum, including Milestone expectations and effective tasking.

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  • Keeping a consistent dialogue with Stakeholders by receiving and paying mind to their feedback, leads to a much smoother development process with fewer surprises.

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  • Keeping firm pillars in mind while moving through development and processing feedback, keeps development moving forward not wayward.

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  • Teams make games, and features need to be negotiated with team-members, with respect to their disciplines.

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  • Sometimes, you need to know when to leverage industry mentors when working outside of your own experience.

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  • Never assume everyone has the same understandings of team-work and expectations. Always be candid, and develop a working relationship with others.

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