Snowpainters
Snowpainters is a casual racing game that allows up to four people to play in local and online multiplayer. The game has three full levels and one tutorial level. Its theme is penguins skiing and sliding on their bellies. You can get ahead of your opponents by painting color of the track with the same color as you.
I was responsible for world building and AI testing during development. Welcome to the world of Snowpainters!
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Role: Level Designer
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Engine: Unreal Engine4
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Genre: Casual Racing Game
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Team Size: 40 Developers
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Development Time: 4 Months
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Released in 2021 July 14th, Steam
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3 Exciting tracks to play and master
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Race with your friends or play alone
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Single track and tournament modes
Steam Link
Postmortem
What Went Well
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We successfully released our game on Steam! During the four-month development process, we gradually pushed the game from a white box to a releasable version.
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I used the real Agile team development model and learned to use Perforce as the team's assets and version control software.
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I have exercised my Q&A ability and can actively repair level design bugs in the levels.
What Went wrong
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The communication problems between the level design team and the art team resulted in a lot of duplication of work. After the two groups met and discussed, we needed to communicate with each other to avoid duplication of work when updating resources and placing art assets
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I am not proficient in the use of work scheduling software and did not effectively use JIRA software for task planning. Therefore, I learned the habit of checking such software every day in the future and submitting the completed tasks at the end of the workday.
What I Learned
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The classification of sub-levels and the naming and classification of resources are particularly important. When someone else takes over a project, a good retrieval system can greatly improve work efficiency.
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I exercised my ability to actively solve problems. Problems that can be solved by oneself are quickly solved after reporting to the lead. The problems that cannot be solved by oneself should be reported to the department responsible after reporting the lead, and as much information as possible included so they can fix it.
Paper Prototype
Since Snowpainters is a racing game, a large number of paper prototypes of the tracks needed to be drawn in the early stages of game development. Therefore, I referenced F1 racing tracks, such as the SAIC Shanghai International Circuit in Shanghai, which makes full use of the ground space while including straight lines and corners of various angles, allowing racers to experience different challenges.
After that, the level design team took the tracks with the most potential. I created a paper map for easy modification, and then made it into a Whitebox in engine.
Set and Test AI
A moderately difficult AI system that runs smoothly ensures a fun and challenging experience. I was mainly responsible for placing the AI spline made by a programmer into the level, and testing and adjusting it.
As shown on the left, the white lines are AI splines.
Difficulty
In the above picture, you can see that there are multiple paths in the level, so the AI splines also needs to branch. If the branch is too early or too late, it could cause the AI to get stuck somewhere on the track. Therefore, we also added a capsule collision box at every branch position to avoid this situation.
Game Balance: Analyze and Adjust
Paint Trails are a trace left by the player or AI after boosting. When the color of the penguin is the same as the color of Paint Trail, the penguin can gain extra speed by touching it. There are three colors of Penguins and Paint Trails in the game. My goal is to make the three colors relatively balanced in each track.
The colors of the three Paint Trails are pink, green and blue. The ratio of green in the track on the right is only about 20%, pink followed it at 30%, and blue is the most at 50%. The Paint Trails in the yellow box are obviously less than other areas. The Paint Trails in the red square area were where AI flew off the track due to improper use of paint ramps and other race mechanics.
In the updated version, I adjusted the layout of the color changing puddles (used to change penguin colors) to make green more dominant than the original. I also added some pickups to the yellow box area. I adjusted the position of paint ramps to avoid accidental flying off of the map. The effect is shown on the right.
