Every Skylanders title adds a new gameplay hook. For Superchargers, our hook was vehicles. While we knew we wanted land, sea, and air vehicles from the start, it took most of the project to really nail down how we would incorporate them into gameplay. We also knew we wanted to keep the traditional, on-foot sections players knew from the earlier games.
Superchargers was developed over 24 months with a team of ~200 using VV’s internal Alchemy engine and Lab toolset.
What I worked on:
I was the level owner for the Cloud Kingdom and Land of the Undead levels. This included:
Deciding on the major and minor mechanics for each level
Creating the initial pitch document
Level blockout and cameras
Creating the mechanics in engine. For more complicated mechanics such as the clouds in Cloud Kingdom and the perspective flips in Land of the Undead, I worked with a gameplay engineer
Working with art to develop themes and landmarks for each level
Creating encounters
Creating puzzle layouts
A top down view of the entire level with all the vehicle gates and flip states.
A closer look at the flip states in the jailcell block
A timelapse of the development of a section of Cloud Kingdom.
Level Mechanic Goals
Each level required 1 unique major and 1 unique minor mechanic. During pre-production, the level design team brainstormed a bunch of mechanic ideas, wrote them out on 3x5 cards, and added them to a board. The cards were intentionally high level to allow as much freedom as possible (eg shrink/grow, fog of war, plant seeds, time manipulation). Each designer would grab one and spend a 1-3 days prototyping the mechanic along with an example of how it could be used in exploration, combat, and traversal then move on to another mechanic. At the end of the week, we would gather to show off our prototypes, talk about what worked and what didn’t, and decide whether the idea showed promise as either a major or minor mechanic.
Cloud Kingdom’s major mechanic was fog of war which was a great way to use all the clouds in the level as part of the gameplay. For the minor mechanic, we wanted to use the light beam puzzles that are core to the series as they made great visual guides amongst the clouds, and we could use them to do cool things with them like burn cloud cover away. Since light beams weren’t a unique mechanic, we combined them with a player-driven rotation platform a gameplay engineer had prototyped.
Land of the Undead’s major mechanic was gravity flip, and its minor was powder keg which went well with the prison break theme. We knew early on that we couldn’t change the gravity direction for real as multiple systems assumed Z was up and changing this was too much of a lift for a single level. Instead we duplicated the parts of the level where we wanted to have the player on a wall or ceiling and rotated everything including the cameras. All the art was in prefabs which made it easy to change things and keep those changes synced across all the flip states. Gameplay engineer Kyle Rothermel wrote the flip state feature which ensured that the player and all relevant objects were teleported seamlessly. He also added features to make the powder keg trail and enemies look good when they were on the non-gameplay surface.
This level was incredibly challenging to design. Not only did sections need to work well with the normal cameras, but they needed to not occlude the camera when the player flipped to a wall or ceiling. All this needed to be understandable to the average 7-year-old and work with local coop and online multiplayer.