Our Obstacles In Level Design

It's Bambo here with another blog post for Prime Orbital Golf (POG)! We've discussed some technical concerns we encountered (and still face) whilst working on POG, but I felt it's time that we covered a bit of the design side of the game. I thought maybe discussing the obstacles we've faced with some of the mechanics we've chosen to implement (some available in the current itch build, and other potentially  coming up in future).

Gravity

The biggest mechanic we have, that players are challenged to work with, is gravity. In a game all about golf with celestial body obstacles in your way, gravity is both friend and foe. For us, there's one interesting design problems we faced (and still face): 

How to communicate the strength of gravity to the player

This single problem is the most persistent issue we've faced when designing the game's mechanics and levels. For obvious reasons! It's the core element of the player's experience of the game. Learning to work with gravity to get the golf ball to the end zone. Without gravity there is no game. I could go on infinitely about this topic but instead here's a practical examples of how communicating gravity strength has impacted our process

Mass-Radius Relationship

One idea we tried was to couple the mass and radius of a planet (the mass being the contributing factor to gravity, and the radius of the planet providing visual feedback to the player). This can be most obviously seen in some of the harder levels available in the game, such as:

When the player encounters this level they come across the first almost gravity trap/well. The large central planets indicate a big pull of gravity towards the centre of the screen. If the player passes through, over or under these planets at high speed they will have their path redirected by the pull of this gravity. However, if they land in the centre they'll find themselves struggling to gain sufficient velocity to escape, it is not impossible but the player must use the skills they've gained to find an escape. Whilst the mass-radius relationship works as an indicator, its feedback is limited in so far as the actual path their ball will take is largely unknowable still.

Path Prediction

The green trail our players have seen is known as our "path predictor". This is a level overlay that appears when the player begins aiming a shot. It grows green and highlights a valid path when the shot is clear, and red with a collision-unaware projection when it is invalid. This predictor is the best indicator of gravitational strength we have. And though its length in the levels is much shorter than the screenshot above (lovely developer tools), it's still far better at indicating gravitational strength than the mass-radius relationship.

And here lies the issue, we boxed ourselves in on the original levels we designed to use this mass-radius relationship, and discovered through testing and discussion that ultimately, no one was using the mass-radius relationship. Why would they? They had a path predictor. Once we learned this the restriction was lifted, allowing our level designer more freedom to create strange combinations of bodies. From low density to high density ones, all thanks to the removal of the mass-radius relationship.

Moons 

Over time it became clear to us that we were lacking some dynamic movement based mechanics. We settled on orbital moons as a sensible choice to solve this issue. The requirements were that moons must orbit a planet, and have mass sufficient enough to alter the gravitational influences on the golf ball. Simple to implement. simple to test, capable of being used in staggered difficulty. However, we discovered that placing moons correctly, and finding the right speeds was difficult. Their ability to knock the golf ball out into space made them risky to interact with for the player, and emergent game play situations were encountered by us and the people we tested with. The main obstacle we had was figuring out how best to incrementally scale difficulty with moons in use.

Finishing Off

As you can see even for such a simple concept as POG, there's a lot of design decisions and iteration to reach a solid set of gameplay mechanics. These various mechanics form obstacles in the design process, and the task of working around them often reveals more interesting gameplay. We've only begun to touch on some of these woes in this post, there are more to come in future. We're always eager to hear back from people who've tried the game as the feedback from players is as crucial as what we ourselves (as developers) find.

Bambo signing out, thanks for reading!