Find deeper fun by killing levels
Steambirds: Survival started with the observation that the core mechanic of maneuvering planes was fun independent of the level design. When we were building the first game, we’d toss in enemy planes nearly at random and interesting combat scenarios would emerge. My personal design process is highly exploratory: I examine a working prototype, identify whiffs of an opportunity and then attempt to amplify those desirable moments in the next iteration. The lack of levels was one such opportunity.
What if we built a version of Steambirds that relied entirely on randomly generated levels where planes came at you in ever increasing waves? In essence, create the Steambirds version of Gears of War ‘Horde mode’. This path harkens back to the escalating arcade mode found in Asteroids, Space Invaders or most traditional arcade games.
At first, we randomly spawned planes and saw how the game played out. Then we polished the systems until the game was fun to play every single time. I observed several higher level attributes of this design process.
- No preferred perspective: We were forced experience the gameplay from a variety of perspectives. When I create static levels, it is easy to quickly fall into a rut where I start polishing the experience for one or two ‘correct’ paths. If a specific scenario is too powerful, I might simply adjust the health of an individual enemy instance so the player has less difficulty. The result is localized polish that translates into shallow gameplay. With random levels, this class of tweaking is impossible. (via Lost Garden: Steambirds: Survival: Goodbye Handcrafted Levels
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