Skylanders Trap Team - Mirror of Mystery Expansion Pack

Infinite Player characters - oh my!

I should bring up that we had an interesting situation with our game, by the time Mirror of Mystery was released there was well over 100 playable Skylanders. So it meant that players would be doing "who knows what" and certain grandfathered in moves(like flying for instance) had their rules changed as games were made. The point being you had to think of the different play styles and how that would work for each encounter in the level. I think this made me stronger at generalizing a strategy for guiding the player with camera and level layout. 

It also created some memorable bugs, like my player driven mech would have certain Skylanders reappear at the feet of it, even though they were supposed to be hidden at the time. When finding issues like this I'd start to look into the Skylander and it's abilities, then see if I can get to the root of the problem. In certain cases I built test levels so the character/combat designers could easily understand the issue, and I think this was very important in helping them to stay on target with such a hefty amount of character combos to deal with.

What did I actually do?

*One thing to note, that it was my job to handle everything that had to do with my levels. I had an assigned artist, designers to bounce iteration ideas off of and creative control over how everything should play out. So that means I handled:

• Level layout - Including white/gray boxing in Maya.

• Level flow

• Gameplay mechanic design

  • Mech with movement and attack - One off that I built for the level, the player never had control of one until this level.

  • Bomb dropping mechanic design - I came up with a way to use old mechanics in new ways, this is huge if you can do it tastefully.

• Quest Design

• Combat Encounters

• Item placement - Destructible prop placement, all the optional/hidden rare items .

• NPC patrols and dialogue

• Push-block Puzzle Design

• Implementing DoTA style team combat system - I borrowed it from another level, "Thanks Ray!", and was able to adjust it to my purpose.

• Camera Angle/Rotation - we used fixed camera angle and had to use trigger boxes to transition from one camera to another.

• Cutscene Cameras - we setup a lot of our own shots.

• Hand writing lots of triggered events - e.g. environment gameplay, like birds flying off when you get close, etc.

Prototyping

Going into this part of the process, you have to accept that anything could be cut, disliked or unavailable later, so always be ready for Plan B and don’t take changes personally. The goal is giving the players the greatest experience possible and not about your personal attachment to your ideas. Fail fast, find the fun, and be just as willing to discard ideas as you are to create them.

The Skylanders Trap Team: Mirror of Mystery expansion started as a simple idea on a yellow sticky note “Opposite World", is what it said, so I started thinking of how fun it would be to create the 'Bizarro World' version of our beloved cast of characters. I knew it would be a blast to make so I grabbed the sticky note off the board and went to work. I'd set it up so the player was helping the usually evil trolls defend themselves from the now evil, good guys. 

Expansion levels didn’t get the same attention as major story mode levels, so adaptability was key. Instead of starting from scratch, I repurposed some existing assets. By our third release, we had a wealth of assets in our in-house TFB Tool (now likely gathering dust at Microsoft’s Activision office). The bomb-falling mechanic in this level came from past work and the player's mech was an old enemy model. The “Frankensteining” didn’t stop there—due to time constraints, flying Mabu enemies in the final flight section were just troll models with new top halves. No one noticed, and it worked.

The takeaway? “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” and be willing to adapt at all times. A level designer’s focus needs to be about the holistic experience and knowing where they can save dev time while not jeopardizing that larger vision.