La Rana is a small, single player puzzle adventure experience. Players control a small frog and must navigate an ancient temple to lift its curse and restore life to the surrounding world. The development team included 14 students and lasted only one semester. In that time we were able to create a lush and engaging world which was well received by players on Steam. While the project was ultimately successful, it struggled during the early phases of development.
One month into the project I was given the role of lead game designer. While I had served in a leadership position in Interstellar Racing League, this was my first experience as game designer. At the time I started, the game was floundering. Team moral was low and, although we had just passed our vertical slice milestone, many of the game’s core mechanics were still in flux.
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At the beginning of the project, La Rana was intended to be a puzzle game similar to Portal or The Talos Principle. The level designers had created many prototypes using a variety of mechanics with varying difficulty. While several were quite successful, our experience as puzzle designers was limited and many of the proposed mechanics were beyond the scope of the project. With only two weeks to solidify the design, I chose to make two major changes to the game. First, I de-emphasized the puzzle aspect of the game to focus instead on exploration. Second, I changed the target audience from adults aged 20-45 to children aged 10-15. These two decisions helped the development process immensely by reigning in the scope of the project.
Moving forward from my two major design decisions, my primary goal was to make sure all team members were on board with the new vision and understood how it would impact their work. For programmers, it meant they could focus on polishing their existing work rather than creating, testing and iterating on new mechanics. For the artists, it gave them an opportunity to express their playful creativity and focus on building and decorating the world. For the level designers, it lessened the pressure of puzzle design and iteration, emphasizing instead their collective interest in exploration and storytelling.
Originally, the project had no narrative. Players simply moved from one area to the next, solving puzzles along the way. This lead to major design difficulties because there was no established tone or logic for the team to follow. Assets and spaces were completely incongruous and didn't build toward a cohesive world. In the first week after becoming game designer, I worked with my team mates to collect ideas and finally author a solid narrative.
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In addition to helping the development process, having a story enhanced the new, exploration focused gameplay. Rather than rewarding puzzle solving with more puzzles, La Rana's system for progression became more sophisticated. In the finished game, areas are sealed by gates which can only be unlocked after activating a number of frog statues. The new mechanic made exploration the focus of the gameplay experience with puzzles serving as challenges to reach out of the way statues. Finding and activating a statue gives multiple rewards. The first is a unique line of the "storybook." Each frog adds a new piece of the story which explains the temple's history and the player's role in its revival. Second, when a statue is activated, a guiding trail appears, leading to its associated gate. This feature helps to orient players and reminds them of their current goal (unlocking the gate).
Post Mortem
What Went Well
Adaptive design: The project faced many challenges during development. My greatest strength during the project was taking what resources were available and making the most of them.
Cross-discipline communication: I worked with all four disciplines during my time on the project. Being able to understand my teammates allowed me to communicate effectively and understand their individual needs and concerns.
Iteration on stakeholder feedback: The stakeholders on the project offered abundant feedback. I was able to critically analyze their concerns and suggestions and then make a plan for addressing them. Being able to understand the needs of the game as well as the feedback from professors and weigh them against time and resources available.
What Went Wrong
Design decisions came too late: Due to circumstances, I was only able to solidify the game design late in development. While these decisions greatly improved the game, the time resources for executing them were not available.
Fear of letting down teammates: I had never served as game designer before. When I started working on La Rana I had the position of Level Designer. As a result, my relationship with my teammates was largely on the level of friends. When hard decisions needed to be made, I sometimes struggled with making the right decision for the game instead of a decision that my team would agree with.
Overscope: When the project started, the game was intended to have more content. As a whole, the team struggled with letting go of features that were outside of scope.
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What Would Be Better
Time for aesthetic polish: Plan for more time in aesthetics to improve overall visual and audio quality.
Scripting zoos: Prototype all scripted elements before including them in the LDD to avoid over-scoping.
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