Food Royale was developed in 5 days with a team of 11 students from the Developer, Art and Game Design of the 4th year course at Supinfogame Rubika. I had two main roles in Food Royale: Game Designer and Level Designer.

Game Designer : A never ending tweak

My main work as Game Designer was tweaking both characters and events. We always had in mind the players's feelings when working on the avatar's controls, since all characters have the same controls. We paid attention to making them fun to use for the players, regardless of the player's skill levels.

Because we had two attacks, we had to find a balance between their utilities, to not have a superior option. For the tweaking of the events, it was more about balance than feeling. The intention was to make them relevant for the players, without making them unfair or king-maker.

Level Designer : Surprise (gently) the player

Level Designer on this project was more about making the Arena dynamic for the players than designing more Arenas. The base concept had always revolved around pushing the opponents. For this goal, the arena had two specificities: it divided into 4 circles, the center stands still, while the others turn to push the players away from it. This created interactions between the center and the outskirts. The fact that they needed to move was good for us, then the attack could miss and create funny moments.

The center served as beacon to force players to fight eachother for it. But only doing this wasn't going to make the arena interesting, we had to make two others things : a timer, and events to spice it up. The timer made the arena fall appart as time passed, so the players could no longer only dodge, they had to go in the center. The events added a bit of "controlled randomness" to this arena, always in the mind to not make them unfair.

What I learned from it

This project increased my attention on little gameplay details and feels. Creating the Level Design was a interesting challenge from what I expected from it. In Food royale, the map layout was simple and straight forward. but adding specificities, and a bit of control randomness, has made the overall experience much better.

The Team