Andrés Alarcón
Combat\Gameplay Designer
McSpace Colosseum
Overview
McSpace Colosseum is a cooperative action rogue-lite for up to 2 players set in a futuristic reality show where participants are set to kill each other.
This game was made with GameMaker Studio 2, over 2 years in a team of 3 people.
My focus areas were Level Design, Monster Design, Boss Design, Tutorial, and Power-ups. But I also helped in System Design, Interface, and Character Archetypes.
World design
In McSpace Colosseum we handled the levels, from a high-level design perspective.
First, we decided on the world's theme that we were creating. For example a jungle level or a rave in a haunted house.
We then decided the world's main mechanic, for instance, if the main focus is bullet-hell or chasers.
This will define both enemies and traps presented in this world.
Boss design
For boss encounter, I designed them taking mechanics presents on the monsters of the level and enhancing them.
In this case, for the boss Don Crablord, I used mechanics from shamans and spawned modified slimes.
I did this because this adds cohesion to the boss with the monsters, and makes the mechanics for the player more intuitive and understandable.
Mechanics were initially conceptualized visually, then a document with coding patterns and instructions was crafted and finally was implemented in the game.
Boss encounter is one of the high notes on videogames, so we took advantage that McSpace Colosseum is made in a reality show to make the entrance as cinematic as possible.
This also helps to sell the idea that you are the protagonist of this wicked reality show.
Level design
Levels we designed taking into account level distribution, (Is the player coming from the north and going south?), the difficulty of the room (Is an easy room or a hard one?), and type of room (has this room traps? Is it a puzzle? Does it have enemies?)
For instance, room serves as one of the highest difficulty. Green squares represent the areas where the player can come to the room. For that purpose, those areas are always left empty and hazardless.
This room was also created with the intention of feeling claustrophobic. In order to generate this feeling, I made the spaces where the action occurs small or with moving hazards. Is important to balance dangerous areas with safe spaces so the player doesn't feel overwhelmed. Red areas represent the path of the moving trunks.
The black marks also show spaces that were created specifically to ease the path for the player.
The main enemy of this room is a King Slime that spawns little monsters continuously. This forces the player to commit to killing him instead of slowly chipping the enemies present.
The purple area was done so the player can cheat their way using a bomb. So experience players can use their game knowledge to influence difficulty.
The difficulty of the room was evaluated using fictional numbers. Monsters were assigned a value based on their difficulty. As we did with traps and how much area has the player to navigate. Adding those numbers gave us a rough idea of the difficulty of the room prior to testing.
Puzzles were designed to be easy short experiences to change a little bit the pacing of the game.
Jungle's main puzzle was two moving idols. You can move the red one and the blue one to mimic the movement of the red one. Moving the blue idol to the blue pedestal completes the puzzle. The colors of the idols were chosen so the player wouldn't mistake them.
The difficulty of the puzzles was assigned based on the times the player would need to move the red idol while keeping the blue idol stuck. No puzzle involved this action more than 3 times.
In this puzzle, I added spikes instead of blocks. Function wise they act the same as blocks since the player wants to avoid taking damage, but adds a cheat way for those players that don't want to think too much and have lives to spare.