CHROME VALLEY CUSTOMS
ROLE
Level designer
ABOUT
Help save the garage by restoring classic cars to their former glory with a wide range of customization options! Work on your mechanic skills: repair, restore, paint, upholster, and finish the cars in the way you like best. To get the parts you need you’ll have to solve puzzles with explosives.
YEAR
Aug 2022 - Oct 2022
GENRES
Puzzle/Decoration
PLATFORMS
ENGINE
Unity
Mobile
Key Responsibilities:
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Designed the layouts, flow, objectives and gameplay of over 60 puzzle levels.
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Analysed the methodology and gameplay experience in competing products.
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Balanced and optimised level difficulty, ensuring design pillars were upheld.
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Worked with lead providing feedback on feature development on the canvas feature & Gaskets Gridlock
Design principles:
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Key points of interest: Choosing obstacles that visually stand out, placing them to indirectly tell players to clear the board in that direction.
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Symmetrical board shape: Using aesthetically pleasing symmetrical shapes ensured players were more willing to return and retry levels.
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Positive feedback loop of opening space: More space on the board -> More tokens/material spawning -> Greater opportunity to progress. The difficulty of the levels were dependent on the effort it took to open up space.
EXAMPLE WORK:
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Vocal points: The purple ants hexagon blockers, the direction is downward.
Main challenge: Clear out the boxes/statues and collect the blue tokens
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Boxes: Can be damaged and destroyed with regular matches and power-ups.
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Statues (purple boxes): Can only be damaged/destroyed with power-ups.
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Metal hexagons: Making matches next to them fills them up. At max capacity, several blue tokens spawn.
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The series of boxes at the top of the level act as a sort of gate, with the main goal being to clear it quickly, so you still have enough moves to dig down towards the vocal points.
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The Experience: The positive feedback loop kicks in as a reward for clearing out the boxes on top, due the huge expansion of space once achieved. From there though, the rest of the level plays at a steady pace due to tougher boxes being introduced as players progress.
Vocal points: Multicolour engine blocks, Ice coolers
Main challenge: Collect beer from the ice cooler blocks.
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Multicoloured engines: Making a match (of each colour) next to them will cause the engine to “rev-up”. Causing a board wide explosion.
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Ice coolers: Hitting the coolers or matching next to them causes several beer bottles to be collected.
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The experience: This level was made to be more fast-paced than most. The cones can be easily broken with regular token matches as well as power-ups. This would’ve resulted in the space in the level expanding quickly, along with the feeling of progress being quick.
From there the players next step would be breaking the giant engine blocks. Which in turn cause a board-wide explosion. Resulting in more tokens/obstacles being cleared out and beer bottles collected. Clearing a set of obstacles feeds into clearing another set of obstacles
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Vocal points: Vending machines and the fuses.
Main challenge: Break through the car-light obstacles
The car-light blockers are similar to the cone obstacles: Subject to gravity and can be moved. However they have double the health. To balance out the difficulty of these obstacles. The Starting space was made larger, as well the green-token spawn being higher for the sake of power-ups.
The experience: Despite the car-lights being harder to destroy than clones. Power-ups are able to be made more frequently. Making each the act of expanding more board space more significant compared to other levels, despite the rate more board space is gained.