Week 15

Introduction and overview of the project

Description
You’re a teenage pogo star “Bucky” embarking on a pogo adventure!
In Tutorial Mode, the player would need to learn the game mechanics.
In Story Mode, the player would explore the environment to collect props and outfit pieces to prepare for the “Pogo Fest”. The player would then attend the Pogo Fest where they do tricks to earn high scores, followed by a timed event to race home before midnight strikes.
The game also includes a Free Roam Mode where the player can freely explore and pogo around.

Goals
To capture the fantasy of pogo sticking and spread the sport of pogo

Deliverables
A controller-based PC game

Team Members
Cassie Lin: UIUX Designer
Henry Lin: Technical Artist, 3D Artist
Bella Liu: Co-producer, Programmer, 3D/2D Artist
Rushil Sojitra: Co-producer, Programmer, Level Designer
Ryan Wu: Level Designer, 3D Artist
Jesse Xu: Programmer, Technical Artist

Acting Client and SME
Xpogo – a company based in Pittsburgh for extreme pogo-sticking

What went well (or what went right)

When brainstorming the project initially, we focused on designing the project based on the strengths of the team. One of our challenges initially was the lack of a dedicated artist who specializes in modeling and texturing. To combat this, we made design decisions for character art and environment art accordingly. For character art, we designed a character with hidden facial features and simplistic shapes to simplify the character model and to expedite the mass production of animation later in the project. For environment art, we chose to use low poly models and solid color textures. To make the environment more appealing, we used saturated based color and a comic-style shader, and a variety of lighting. These design decisions highlighted our strength in technical art and achieved an appealing stylized look while avoiding complicated modeling and texturing. We also designed the project to be mechanics and level-focused due to the team having strong technical skills and level design experience.

Another element that helped our success was defining a reasonable scope. Around Quarters, we had overscoped our project by envisioning three huge levels with different art styles and world-building. We decided to make a demo level for Half first, which informed us of the time and effort needed to craft a level. This experience helped us rescope our level design to two smaller levels with a consistent art style. The decision allowed us to finish our levels and environment art by Soft Opening and polishing everything afterward.

The focus on mechanics also contributed to our success. During project brainstorming, we decided to focus on mechanics since capturing the sense of pogoing would be crucial to the game feel. We combined the physics engine and animation system together to create the mechanics. The movement trajectory of the character was determined by the physics engine, and then we added in-place animation – like the bounce on the ground and flips – to smoothly blend with the physics. This allowed for a realistic feel of the pogo physics while keeping the character stylized and appealing. We also focused on refining the core mechanics over and over again, reconfiguring the collision, physics, and animations repeatedly to make the mechanics more consistent, realistic, and fun. We aimed for the goal that “players can pogo around in an empty environment and it would still feel fun”, and we can proudly say that we achieved this goal since multiple playtesters expressed this to us.

Finally, the playtests had a significant impact on the iterations of our project. Aside from Quarters, Half, and Soft Opening, the team participated in almost all Playtest Tuesdays, middle school and high school student playtests, and hosted our own playtest sessions. This helped us iterate on our core mechanics and levels almost every week to ensure everything is polished and well-tested.

What could have been better (or what went wrong)

Currently, even though players enjoy pogoing around the level, the story mode requires them to collect all outfits from the environment and then go to the pogo fest stage to do a performance. To collect the outfits, the player requires claps which require advanced tricks that can be done after a rocket boost which can only be filled by doing classic tricks. This system of collecting outfits works really well for exploration inside the level which was one of our goals. However, the current system of doing tricks for outfits can be fun for players initially but they might spam the tricks in order to game the system and get the outfits faster. This way, they don’t have a solid enough motivation to do tricks by themselves. So, if given more time, we would definitely want to include a scoring system for tricks which means that they have inherent value while also adding a combo system encouraging players to combine different tricks.

Another thing we wished we had been able to do was add a condition for bailing (falling from the pogo stick). Bailing is a crucial part of the pogo-sticking experience and was also mentioned by our client and SME. However, when we playtested with players, we found that stopping the momentum was rather frustrating for them and they did not feel that they were in control when they were playing the game. This made us reluctant to add a bailing functionality. So again, if given more time we would definitely want to figure out a non-rhythm or fun approach to introduce bailing to the game. Maybe it could be because of a failed trick like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or it could be because of not landing at a correct angle on the ground.

Lessons learned and conclusion

One of the most important lessons that we learned, especially for semester projects wishing to polish the product, is to have a version of the game finished soon after halves and then continue to iterate on the game after that. Since we had a scope that was extremely contained, we were able to finish our complete gameplay loop for story mode 2 weeks after fall break and then we used the playtesting opportunities to polish whatever mechanics we had, changing and fixing what did not work. This also gave us the opportunity to focus on some player experience features that we could not have had we scoped for something bigger as it would have taken us almost the whole semester to finish the game itself.

Talking about playtesting, iterating was another important aspect that helped us in creating the game as mentioned before. We found that setting milestones around big playtesting opportunities like Playtest Day was very crucial as it is way better to have a large batch of playtesters, especially for a game project like this because individual playtests might not yield good data about what is going wrong. We also iterated on several mechanics and level designs before halves during our pre-productions and that was extremely useful in figuring out what does not work while also figuring out the fantasy we wanted the players to feel.

Additionally, it is also important that the team members are motivated to improve the player experience and excited to work on the project. All our team members took the initiative to improve the game from whatever domain they were working on and because we received positive feedback during Playtest Nights, everyone on the team was more motivated to make it better.

Conclusively, the project went very well and smoothly from our perspective and we are fully satisfied with the design decisions we have had to make. There are several things we could have done better with more time and would love to do so in the future.

Talking about the future, we plan to release the game that we currently have on Steam and Itch and more platforms if we have a chance, possibly for a small price. However, these publishing sites require us to have a company for that, we are still figuring out ways to create a studio of our own, especially as International Students. Hopefully, we will figure it out soon and people around the world will be able to immerse themselves into the fantasy of extreme pogo sticking! Happy POGOing!!