Neonite

Neonite

Summary

Neonite is a shoot-em-up isometric game and the third game I was part of developing at The Game Assembly. The gameplay consists of the player playing as a combat robot, moving, dashing over gaps and shooting at different types of enemies with three different weapons. There's also a sad story about the robot being the last of its kind.

Specifications

  • Created in 8 weeks half time
  • Team consisted of 3 level designers, 3 artists and 7 programmers
  • Made using the in-house engine TGA2d
  • Levels created using the Tiled level editor
  • Gameplay scripting and balancing done in XML.

My Contributions

  • Level Design
  • Game Design
  • Created the Blue and the Purple level
    • Pre-production
    • Prototyping
    • Building
    • Balancing
  • Gameplay balancing
  • Narrative implementation

The team

Level Designers:

  • Julia Holmlund
  • Olivia van den Born
  • William Falck

Artists:

  • Alexander Samuelsson
  • Anders Bo Johansson
  • Elise Fogelström

Programmers:

  • Anders Löfquist
  • Erik Ahlund Helguera
  • GP Yang
  • Hampus Huledal
  • Mikael Enarsson
  • Simon Skogsrydh
  • Tobias Jansson

Level Design

In previous game projects I've made, it was all about creating an environment that would feel cohesive and have a story. In contrast, these levels were all about the gameplay being in the forefront, with the cohesiveness of the environments and the story behind it mattering less. This was a really good exercise for me and I learned a great deal about both making gameplay-oriented levels, as well as lessons about myself as a designer.

One of the things I learned was that I want my levels to have a backstory, because it makes inspiration come a lot easier to me. However, I tried to keep the gameplay to the forefront at all times, creating a story around a level that was fun to play in rather than the other way around. For instance, I had an introduction of a new type of enemy in my level. First, I placed it in a part of the level where it was needed gameplay-wise and it was fun to face it. Secondly, I started thinking about what the enemy was, and why it was there. It ended up with me placing narrative about the enemy in different parts of the level and I ended up creating the backstory for them as well. This in turn helped me with where I should place the later encounters of this particular enemy in the level.

 

Balancing

While we all made the big decisions together, I took some responsibility of balancing the game which was very educational and useful later on. Among the most important things that I learned was to always keep my ears open for input, since the important thing about the balancing is that it should feel as good as possible to as many people as possible.

I found balancing to be extremely fun and rewarding to work with since there are so many parameters that need to be taken into account that everything becomes like an equation. Only that it is an equation that has multiple solutions, depending on who the player is. Since I am a person who loves math this was thrilling to work with, however I tried not to let the mathy part of me take over, instead listening mostly to the opinions of people.

 

Conclusion

This was a rewarding game to work on where I got to dabble in a bit of everything. Especially, I got to learn some useful lessons about game design and gameplay during this project. I learned to work with both Tiled and XML language in the process of this project, which I'm very happy about. I feel like we did a good job and managed to hand in a fun game.

Screenshots