So Long GDC 2025!
About:
Bubblegum Beatdown is a glittery magical, hack & slash game where you play as a magical girl fighting demons in a mall. Liberate the different parts of the mall, unlock new magical girl powers, and use them to save the mall and the world!
Role: Encounter/Level Designer
Team: Team Half ‘n Half
Engine: Unreal 5
Platform: PC
Dev Time: 6 Months
Timeframe: Aug-Dec, 2023
The “Food Court” was my first attempt at designing a liner level. As someone who loves hack-and-slash titles, I was extremely excited to be able to flex my level design muscles in a new environment while also getting my first chance at encounter design. My goals for the player were to traverse floors, defeating enemies, in order to reach and complete a boss encounter at the height of the food court.
While conceiving the game's levels with the design team, we knew that one level would be set in a mall. I wanted to find a location that could offer players a 10-15-minute linear experience inside a relatively confined space.
I felt that a food court would be a good mixture of confined spaces (maintenance hallways and restaurants) and open areas (mezzanine and dining area) and that the diversity of the playspace would open up a lot of opportunities for combat and puzzle encounters. I started researching mall and foodcourt interiors as well as taking trips into the field to local malls for reference photos and inspiration to make a 2D sketch of the layout.
After I built the foodcourt in engine, I used the 2D sketch and first build to design the player's path through the environment. Initially, I allowed players the freedom to traverse the entire lower area of the level to rush to get a key to access the boss area on the uppermost floor. However, this led to most players skipping many of the combat scenarios and missing vital checkpoints/triggers making progression tedious.
To get the player to follow a more curated path, I used a loop in the flow of the layout to force the player into the lower and more open combat arena first to acquire a key, then allowing them to take a shortcut up to the locked door that gives them access to the boss arena. This not only majorly improved the flow of the map, but also allowed me to control the pace at which each encounter is engaged with, but also the duration and difficulty scaling.
Having not been in a position to work on designing encounters before I was very impressed by how naturally it came to me, as well as how easy it was to integrate it within my level design pipeline. After this project, I actively look forward to being able to design more encounters in tandem with all aspects of game design.
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