Jérémy de Frémont
JUNIOR Level Designer
PITCH
Ragoon Rumble is a food-centered roguelike, where you use your cooking pot to defeat the alimonsters that you will face through your exploration of the Yum-Yum Forest. Gather ingredients and mix them to discover what powers they will grant you; and what even greater power you can get when making the right mixes... Special items found within the depths of the forest will also help you in your battle.
Go far enough in your exploration and you might just come across super alimonsters with special attacks that will make your life difficult... Roll and cook away to try to make it out alive! In Ragoon Rumble, ingredients, items and rooms are procedurally generated to keep the identity of a classic roguelike. However, how you use your ingredients and the recipes you choose to cook are up to you! Play Ragoon Rumble now and help Ragoon be the best chef to save the Yum-Yum Forest!
MY ROLE ON THE PROJECT
Level Design :
- Difficulty Curve
- Rooms Iteration
- Block-Out
- Run path
- Ennemies and reward Set-up
Game Designer :
- Room Event (killed)
The project had already 6 months of development when I joined it.
My main mission was to help the first Level Designer create a complete run with many rooms and variants. It required a "semi-procedural" system to establish replayability and a change for the player at each try.
DOCUMENTATION
We have created a path to present a normal game experience. It contains a few branches with reward choices so that the player can create their own route according to their playing style (for example entering a room containing healing rather than a room containing a buff, if the player is injured).
Once the path was created, it was necessary to determine which enemies to put in each room, the number of waves etc, to manage the difficulty.
Each monster has a difficulty score, which allows us to visualize in real time the curve of our run.
Final run
LEVEL DESIGN EVOLUTION
When I joined the project, 6 months of development had passed and we only have 6 weeks of work left. So we decided to create the levels directly on Unity in block-out.
Each room had to have 3 variations to change the player’s experience with each try. We would change either the enemies in the room (keeping the same difficulty) or the position of Level Design elements like barrel bombs or decor elements
Variant 2A
Variant 7A
Variant 2B
Variant 7B
Variant 2C
We realized that we were running out of time to do everything we wanted in Level Design, so we decided to reduce the number of variants
We also make some changes in the rooms after having tested them (Larger areas for example or different challenges than initially planned).
New Variant 2B
New Variant 2C
New Variant 7A
New Variant 7B
After experimenting enough our rooms, we added the final version of the enemies and loot.
Thanks to the tools created by the programmers, we were able to easily set-up the enemy spawn areas, wave numbers etc. We also strongly swung the number of items given by the game.
Doors bring in one of the chosen variants. Above is indicated the reward behind (care, food, item,...), we leave the player the choice to trace their own route according to their needs.
Our goal at this stage was to balance the player experience.
Reward Manager
Door Manager
Choice of doors