Hardcore Pizza Delivery
Hardcore Pizza Delivery is a first-person platformer where the player uses ground and grapple based movement to deliver pizzas and find collectables in several challenging stages.
For this project I took the role of a game/level designer and UI/UX designer
Overview
This project was challenging and a lot of fun to work on. It lead me to further my knowledge of Unreal Engine and its blueprint system as I had only previously worked in Unity. It was the second pitch I made to the team and I’m glad that it peaked their interests.
Balancing the player's movement and making sure it felt good and snappy was also a challenge, but over several iterations and testing I'm happy with the way it turned out. Levels were with out a doubt the most fun to create and test.
I worked on the tutorial, the hub level, and the New York City level, all of which went through several iterations.
Takeaway
Contributors
Artist
Megan Forouhi
Danny Lopez
Andy Ocampo
Adrian Yogore
Designers
Sam Hirsch
Brendan Lienau
Jethro Schoppenhorst
Programmers
Aaron Baer
Carley Thompson
Sound Designers
Music Composer
Ryan Redebaugh
Voice Actor
Matthew Bonte
David Antognoli
Jake Reilly
Eric Kwon
Testers
Work Samples
The first level I worked on was the tutorial level. It went through so many iterations and several different designs before I landed on what is in the game now. Initially we had two separate tutorial levels, one designed by myself that would teach the player the general movement of the game such as walking, running, jumping, etc. and another tutorial created by another designer of ours, Danny Lopez, that would teach the player the swinging mechanics.
In my initial design for the movement tutorial, I threw a lot of the controls at the player right away and set them up for an obstacle course. In hindsight, I see many flaws already with this design. For example, the player is taught how to walk, run, and jump all in the same area with no regard for the isolation principle, giving the player no time to breathe and learn.
Tutorial Level
I sent this greybox to our artist Megan Forouhi so that she could deliver back a more complete look of the level. After implementing the level into Unreal and playtesting it several times, it was pretty clear that the level was not very good at teaching the player.
We also realized that it didn't make too much sense to separate the tutorials for movement and swinging. After discussing these issues with the team we decided that we would convert the original swinging tutorial into a speed course and we would be introducing the swinging mechanics into the first tutorial.
So I went back to the drawing board to create a more concise and understandable tutorial.
This was the final design we used with some small alterations. I prefer this design a lot more as it isolates each of the mechanics into their own learning section and was overall easier to understand for playtesters.
Here’s a quick speed run of the tutorial level:
One of my first tasks after our programmers created the first player blueprint was to measure out the player's movement and size.
I created a "gym" level where we could test and alter the player's movement depending on the tester's feedback.
In Game Metrics Measurements
The initial player's movement was very “floaty” and felt very slippery, but it served its purpose as a test.
I recorded the measurements of this iteration of the player blueprint and created a document for the entire team to look at and use.
While we did want to make the game’s movement more “arcade-y”, the measurements recorded for this initial player controller were way over the top so it was clear we needed to make some changes.
After implementing the swinging and a couple of playtesting sessions I went in and adjusted the metrics and added a measurement for the grapple gun.
The player still felt a little “floaty” and a lot more changes were made to the player during development that didn’t make it to this diagram that really improved the game feel.
Overall, this was an incredibly fun project to work on with a wonderful and talented team.