Never Split the Party is a co-op multiplayer game, styled after The Binding of Isaac. I worked on over the summer of 2018 as a level and enemy designer.
“That’s what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning.”
Goals:
Make a multiplayer rogue-like.
Keep the game free to play.
Encourage players to play with others without resenting it.
I was brought on during the alpha of this project. I reached out to Bryan who I had previously worked with on Asteria after seeing clips of the game and feel in love with the idea. Anything co-op excites me, and I am also a huge fan of quick rogue-likes mash them together and I was excited to help tackle many of the challenges that this combination presents.
Level Design
I was first tasked with creating levels for the game. This was really fun, some rooms would come together right away and I even got to create some inspired by past games such as Heigan in WoW. But it can be hard when you have limited tools and strict requirements of where things can go. (Each room must beatable regardless of what door you enter from, the center must be open, and you can't lock doors behind keys or explodable walls.) This forces you to get creative though and often times you can make similar rooms with small changes to create drastically different experiences.
I wanted to make sure there was a good variety of rooms, I wanted to make sure that each one had a theme and goal. I achieved this through things such as to what shape the room was, enemy types, puzzles, hero objects, and rewards. I had a lot of fun making challenges that would ask the player to solve the room in a unique way such as what bomb to set off, and always thinking about what choices the player had to make at any moment.
This involved A LOT of play testing, not only to make sure things worked as I expected but to also make sure they provided the right kind of challenge and allowed the player to feel clever when appropriate. Often times I would change a room because the challenge wasn't right or enemies would be changed requiring the levels to shift too.
Enemy Design
My favorite enemy was the Punter. They are this big headed goblin looking guys who will charge right at you. If they hit you than you are knocked into a random room and split from your party. Many rooms where built around this idea, and when the player is punted they are spent to the center of whatever room they were kicked into. We built another enemy that could teleport players into other rooms but it didn't allow for the same level of panic that a charging goblin would instill.
Next would be the poison Slimes. While Slimes are about as basic as it gets for an RPG I enjoyed the poison Slimes because they were designed to change the place space. Slimes are weak enemies that simply charge the player, but when the poison slime died they would leave behind a pool that would damage players that walked into it until it dissipated. This forced the player to priorities enemies and think not only about who to kill first, but also where to kill them.
Each floor was themed with Fire, Ice, Earth, and Air meaning we wanted unique enemies for each element Air would charge you while Ice would stun the player, Fire left flames on the ground while Earth's projectile would go though objects. This allowed us to build rooms tailored to each enemy type. This became cyclical as enemies would inform level design and level's would inform enemies.
All of these required play testing and tuning, such as fast an enemy can go when many of your networked players are using slower connections across the globe. The best example of this was the teleporter mentioned before, this enemy would teleport around the room and create a cloud that if the player touched would send them into another room. When we played the game in the same room this wasn't a problem, but for many players they couldn't see the effect before getting hit, or the enemy would teleport to frequently to attack. This meant we had to increase the time the player must be in the cloud effect and tune the enemy to better match this.
Engaging with the community
While this wasn't officially part of my job I have always admired developers who engage with their player base. Places like Riot or smaller indie devs drastically improve their games by constantly engaging with their players. I wanted to do the same. So I made sure to discuss the game with them. We would talk about design as I talked with them about what they wanted the game to have or what was missing. Some suggestions would be out of scope like playing as the bosses, but I always enjoyed getting to the heart of what they wanted. And asking them to think deeply about their design ideas, and the experience it would create.
Other times this meant discussing bugs, or answering questions about things that weren't clear enough. Durring alpha the most common thing I would get messaged about is getting a key to the game. It has been very rewarding to see people enjoy something I have been working on and passionate about it's development.
If you have other questions about this game's development I would love to chat more so feel free to ask.
Try the game
https://store.steampowered.com/app/711810/Never_Split_the_Party/