Prism’s Core Mechanic Design
Developing Prism’s core mechanic to serve as the foundation for Prism’s gameplay and level design.
Role: Game Designer
Timeline: 8 weeks
Tools: UE5
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Prism had been in the planning phase of development focusing on ideating the game’s design pillars and narrative. Though aspects of the plot have been established, Prism’s core mechanic and gameplay loop had yet to be defined. This prototype developed over 3 sprints aimed to develop a solid core gameplay loop, the crucial foundation for shaping Prism’s plot and level design ahead of pre-production.
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Identify and iterate potential gameplay features
Validate mechanics through play test feedback
Design a core mechanic and game loop
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A ‘Magnetic Throw’ mechanic with similarities to other popular mechanics such as Krato’s Axe and Captain America’s shield but with its own unique identity inspired by magnetism.
Ideation
Prototyping initial ideas
Before this project’s development, I prototyped my initial ideas for magnetic abilities in Unity to visualize them and better understand how to expand on them. I then prototyped these mechanics in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) to see how these abilities would play out in 3D. These early prototypes served as a proof of concept that I had both the skills and appropriate technology to develop Prism’s mechanics.
The initial ideas for Prism’s mechanics and gameplay
🎥 Visit my TikTok and YouTube channel for the extended version of these videos.
I learned that prototypes:
Add tangible context to obscure ideas to help them take shape.
Shed light on what mechanics are or aren’t enjoyable and worth further exploring.
Inspire new ideas through spontaneous playfulness.
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Initial pitch concepts
Pitching game concepts
The goal of sprint 1 was to brainstorm and pitch gameplay concept ideas and to pick an area of focus for the rest of the sprints. The first idea was to focus on using magnetic abilities for navigation and exploring a space. The second concept was focused on combat and how to use magnetic abilities to escape a horde of enemies. Presentation feedback suggested combining both ideas into 1 gameplay concept that explored using magnetism for both platforming and attacking enemies.
Prism’s Level 1 Act 1 concept
I combined the 2 game concept ideas into 1 and planned my sprint schedule with testing features that supported this gameplay.
Chosen pitch concept
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👩🏾🏫 View my Final Pitch Presentation for this project.
Contextual Research
Super Mario 64’s development
Inspired by Mario’s jump mechanic development, this project focused on exploring magnetism’s affordances in different situations to refine and add depth to a core mechanic. Mario’s jump is the pinnacle of iterating over a mechanic till its design not only is enjoyable in various contexts but also reveals new abilities the more a player experiments with it. A literature review on Super Mario 64's development and rapid prototyping was done to imbue the prototyping process with a similar approach.
The Research conducted to inform my development process and potential features
Key takeaways:
The secret behind the Mario game feel is spending a lot of time fine-tuning mechanics
Shigeru Miyamoto spent the vast majority of his time moving Mario around in an empty space jumping, picking up and dropping items
Nintendo focuses on solidifying the fundamentals of their games then expand from their core concepts for as long as time allows
Rapid prototyping process
Rapid prototyping is the process of quickly developing gameplay to answer designers’ questions about their game’s mechanics, aesthetics, kinesthetics or technology. Since Miyamoto and his team were continuously creating and playing prototypes to validate their design choices, the process of rapid prototyping was explored to adopt this workflow for exploring Prism’s mechanics. I was especially inspired by Four grad students from Carnegie Mellon University and their paper on their experience prototyping 50 games in 1 simester with Jesse Schell as their advisor.
“As I gathered experience throughout the project, I was able to take more directed risks that lead to successful games.”
Key takeaways:
Have a theme & gameplay goal because constraints help foster creativity and cohesive game design
Tracy Fullerton’s ‘Game Design Workshop’ recommended keeping things simple prototyping to answer 1 gameplay question at a time during early development
Continue to adapt development plans as necessary to remove blockers and prevent scope creep
Magnetic & telekenetic powers
Video games, TV shows and films were reviewed by noting what abilities were used and what impact they had within a given context. The goal was to find what comonalities between magnetic and telekenetic powers makes them so compelling and what unique elements sets them apart from each other. Whether it was grabbing and hurling objects in the environment, taking and using enemies weapons or propelling enemies themselves, each of these abilities allowed characters to use the environment to their advantage.
👩🏾🏫 View my Final Pitch Presentation for this project.
📜 Review my full research summary in my Pitch Review & Supporting Document.
Key takeaways:
Have players make use of their environment
Let players use magnetism in various ways
Use interactable objects to provide diegetic information
Planning
Adapting deveopment plans
I routinely reassessed the project timeline and made adjustments based on project blockers to work around and insights player feedback. In the prototyping section I explain why I refocused the project to focus on combat instead of player movement after discovering how fun the magnet throw mechanic is.
Timeline and feature iterations
Defining sprint goals and development tasks
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Initial user stories
“As a character being chased, I would like to be able to defend myself, so that I can get away from enemies if they surround me.”
“As a character with unique powers, I would like to be able to use my abilities to navigate places my enemies can’t, because it would make it easier to avoid enemies.”
“As a character escaping, I would like to be able to understand where to go next, so that I can keep moving towards my exit.”
Defining user stories
When first creating user stories, I was only focusing on what players are doing and why. This was enough to design mechanic ideas from but my user stories were too specific, therefore limiting what the gameplay could be.
2nd iteration of user stories
Which metal object should I use next?
“As a character with the environment at my disposal, I want to be challenged with which metal object to use, so I can create strategies to defeat enemies.”
How will enemies react when I do ‘this’?
“As a character with powers that impact my enemies’ behavior, I would like different metal objects to have varied effects on them, to enjoy how powerful I feel.”
What else can I do?
“As a character with the environment at my disposal, I would like my attacks to have some spontaneity to them, so as I play I can explore what else I can do.”
Updating user stories
After reviewing my user stories with my mentor, he explained how focusing on what I want the player to think, feel and do will help me consider the player’s entire experience when designing mechanics. I then developed user stories for each of those thoughts to help me design features that support what I’d like players to focus on.
Think
Which metal object should I use next?
How will the enemies react when I do ‘this’?
What else can I do?
Do
Defeat all enemies
Feel
Powerful
Resourceful
Humored
3rd iteration of user stories
What do I need to react to this scenario?
“As a player with the environment at my disposal, I want to have creative control over how I use the environment, to react to challenges in my own unique way.”
How will enemies respond when I do ‘this’?
“As a player with influence over my enemies’ behavior, I want to experiment with how using the environment effects enemies , to explore what else I can do.”
Making user stories high level
After reviewing my user stories with my mentor again, he said I needed to make them more general and treat them as filters to parse my feature ideas through. He suggested focussing on how players use the environment to react and make decisions based on different scenarios. Focus on the environment also aligned with my contextual research findings. Throughout the game’s development I’ll continue to adjust these user stories to eb and flow with the game design intent and players’ experiences.
Think
What do I need to react to this scenario?
How will enemies respond when I do ‘this’?
Do
Defeat all enemies
Use their environment
Be reactive to different scenarios
Feel
Powerful
Resourceful
Humored
Prototyping
Sprint 1: Experimenting
with movement
In addition to project planning, in sprint 1 I was inspired by force athleticism from Star Wars and worked on systems that used magnetic abilities to platform. However, these systems felt lacking as I wasn’t providing players ways to directly interact with the AI enemies. I began to experiment with ways to throw objects instead but using UE5’s physics engine to do so didn’t provide much control over the objects.
My development process over the course of three 2 week long sprints
Movement systems explored:
Wall jump
Pulsing off of metal surfaces
A flight system to simulate Prism flying through areas surrounded with metal surfaces
🎥 Visit my TikTok and YouTube channel for the extended version of these videos.
Sprint 2: Designing Prism’s magnetic throw mechanic
One of the PhD students suggested creating static objects when the player is holding objects instead of only using physics to move objects. Giving the appearence of physics behaving like magnetic powers worked much better as grabbing and throwing objects felt more precise and predictable.
Programatic break down
Line tracing to highlight grabbable objets
Moving selected physics object towards player
Destroying physics object and creating static object
Static object is attached to player’s hand socket
On throwing or dropping an object, the static mesh is unassigned and a new physics object instance is created
Sprint 2: Play Testing
Overall everyone thought throwing the magnetic ball was fun and satisfying. One play tester said it felt like throwing Captain America’s shield. Another said they liked that since the object returned back to them as long as they had good aim, they didn’t have to find more amo which felt like a reward system in itself. Everyone also had great constructive feedback which inspired helpful updates like a more user friendly control scheme, spatial UI feedback when holding objects and varying enemy responses per type of object thrown.
Players enjoyed:
Objects return to you without needing to find another
The enemies’ back flip animation when being hit
Players wanted:
A different control scheme
Variation in enemies responses from different objects
To see some parkour and platforming
Thrown objects to ricochet off of other objects
A radial magnetic attack
Sprint 3: Attacking multiple enemies with 1 throw
I added depth to the magnetic throw mechanic this round by chaining enemy hits together so that players can throw an object once to hit every enemy in range before the object returns to them. This was done by looping through an array of enemies within a sphere collision to update the thrown objects next target location with the next enemy location.
Programatic break down
Detecting NPCs overlapping the magnetic field
On throw, looping through enemies updating the next thrown object’s next target location with the next enemy
Triggering enemy reactions on being hit
If all enemies have been hit, the object returns to the player
Sprint 3: Play Testing
Players enjoyed the new chained attack feature and an unintended glitch allowing them to spam attacks. This round of testing shed light on how I can improve the game’s usability and expand on what the player found fun. This play test highlights video shows clips from each session organized by the following key takeaways.
Key takeaways
Attacking multiple enemies feels good
Need to fine tune aiming
Add variation to enemy hits
Refine how to pick up objects
Spamming attacks would be fun
Update & provide more UI information
Next Steps in Process
Extend mechanic into gameplay loops
Play with Prism’s magnetic abilities to discover what affordances they intuitively provide players to design meaningful systems.
Develop a combat gameplay demo
Demo Prism’s gameplay in a battle arena level to showcase her abilities and platforming.