WACKY NOODLE
GAME DESIGNER
Project role
UNREAL ENGINE 4
Engine
8 weeks
Duration
Have you ever dreamed of being a great jousting knight?
Dashing around on your noble steed and knocking other honorable knights of their horses? Of course you have! But horses are expensive, so a pig will do.
Knock your friends off their piggy by poking them with a pool noodle.
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ABOUT
Fast paced
On your speedy mount you will be traversing the arena at high speeds chasing around other players or being chased in return.
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Fun Art
With a fun cartoony art style the game will try and pull you right into it's wacky world. Customize your blob man with some cardboard armor and enter a world that looks straight out of a kid's imagination.
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Multiplayer
Everything is more fun with some friends. Grab your friends and join them for a match in Wacky Noodle. A fun party game that anyone can enjoy regardless of skill level.
PROJECT ROLE
Wacky noodle was the first multi-disciplinary project that I was a part of at Breda University of applied sciences. At this point there were only 3 roles to specialize in. Game design, art and programming. Further specialization in roles would not happen until in the later years of the study. The following are my biggest contributions to the project during its 8 week run.
As a game designer...
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Research arena based multiplayer party games
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Explore a wide variety of potential arena designs through sketching
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Iterations and playtesting to tweak the player camera
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Implement art assets into the game
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Two fully playable levels in the game
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Jurassic Playpark​
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Wacky Gardens
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RESEARCH
Multiplayer arena design principles
This project was the first time I ever worked on multiplayer level design. This was a big departure of the previous projects I had done so far at the University. Because of this I started with doing research into how designing of multiplayer levels in games works and gathering some references for games that are good to look at when designing my own arenas.
Research document
Sketching and exploration
After that it was time to start exploring some different types of layouts that I could use for the arenas I'd be designing for Wacky Noodle. Here I started with trying out various shapes. For my own convenience and looking at the time constraints on the project I went with a simple mirrored design. That would make it easy to create and iterate on while also making sure all the player starting locations would be balanced.
Sketch exploration
Variation exploration
LEVEL DESIGN
Creating the arena
After the planning and research step was done it was time to start creating an actual playable arena. I ended up creating two arenas for the game. At first I started simply blocking out the arena with some simple cube meshes. Those measurements were then taking by the art team to create assets. These assets were placed in the level by during further iterations. But later the artists did an actual art pass themselves to really prettify the level.
Iterations to Jurassic Playpark
Justifying iterations
Early on in development one of the programmers on the team developed a heatmap tool. With this tool we could easily visualize which areas of the map were getting their intended use and which areas of the map were underused. An example on the right is that in the original version of the map players would generally stick to the inner corners to go around the map as fast as possible and only really deviated from it while running to or from other players.​
Heatmap data