Toy Tactics
Lead Level Designer | Kraken Empire
PC, Play Station 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
06.2021 – 08.2024
Awards
- It’s Nice That
- AIGA
- Fonts In Use
- The Dieline
Platform
Consoles, PC
Overview
Game description
Toy Tactics is an RTS where you can draw unit formations and command units based on minifigs. Under the guidance of legendary generals, master the ability to draw configurations into the battlefield and send miniature legions to war against hordes of undead foes. Charge up your army with artifacts and destructive spells to give you the upper hand in battle and smash your foes in real time. Think fast, deploy your units strategically, and lead them to victory!
Responsabilities
• Responsible for the quality of the levels in the game’s campaign, multiplayer, and additional game modes.
• Proposing and executing layouts that fulfill and complement the needs of the level.
• Blocking out the game spaces.
• Establishing best practices and broad goals about the nature of the level design.
• Establishing the vision, goals, and moment-to-moment flow for every level.
• Testing, collecting feedback, iterating, and determining which concepts best suit the game.
• Scripting AI, terrain, cameras, and other game elements given by the developers.
• Design and implement enemy encounters.
• Partnering with programmers, artists, narrative, and others to achieve a cohesive product.
• Mentoring and managing four level designers.
Contributions
My primary responsibility in Toy Tactics was leading the level design team to deliver a dynamic and varied experience focused on creating an accessible RTS game with an entirely novel control system.
I was responsible for producing the main single player campaign, multiplayer levels, cooperative levels, and skirmish levels, while also mentoring and managing the workload of four level designers who worked on additional and independent game modes meeting the publisher’s milestones.
Additionally, I designed the combat encounters, scripted the AI, cameras, and collaborated with other departments on the mechanic’s design, UX, and development tools, ensuring clear communication, providing common goals, and maintaining consistency across disciplines.
Finding the identity
I had a key role in finding Toy Tactics level design philosophy. When I joined the team, the level design was influenced by classic RTS games, featuring large battlefields and fights with numerous units.
Eventually, we got a more accessible formula by incorporating puzzles and physics-based situations that maintained a varied gameplay rhythm.
We built more appealing levels by using verticality, carefully measured spaces, and intricate layout designs that enhanced the drawing mechanics.
Invisible difficulty
To satisfy experienced RTS players, we implemented secondary objectives. This allows less experienced players to focus on the main objective while providing challenging optional goals for advanced players, creating an "organic difficulty selection".
The player’s strategy and relationship with the space change dramatically based on this choice, motivating and rewarding different play styles with the level design while encouraging players to step out of their comfort zones.
Playable space with optional challenges.
Documentation
I was responsible for creating a document that contained detailed information about each level to track progression and identify potential pacing issues. I expanded its information according to the team’s needs to efficiently communicate with the QA, art, narrative, and programming departments.
This document has an overview page with linked data to the dedicated pages, which contains detailed information such as mechanics tracking, gimmicks, level descriptions, unit types, factions, chest content, difficulty level, scene objectives, etc.
Game modes
Throughout the campaign, each level had different game modes such as conquest, payload escort, defense, capture the flag, leader elimination, and boss battles, containing a total of 70 unique scenarios.
I also designed competitive multiplayer and cooperative levels, along with an additional skirmish campaign.
Keeping players engaged
Every level offers an intrinsic value to the player. Whether it’s learning a new mechanic, evoking an emotion, or creating a memorable moment, all levels were designed with a very clear intention in mind.
I also added what we call "Candy levels". These are easy levels with a very special gimmick that keeps the gameplay fresh, usually placed after a challenging level.
Design highlights
Making objectives more emotional
Initially, the animals were intended solely to decorate the exterior areas of the levels. In a situation where I needed to distract the enemies for a while, I decided to use them as punching bags to give the player enough time to ambush.
During playtestings, we realized that players felt a sense of urgency to defend them, creating an emotional bond with the animals and making the objective much more meaningful.
Ultimately, this mechanic became one of the most memorable elements of the game, turning into a recurring feature during tutorials and secondary objectives.
Tutorizing a new control scheme
Since our main selling point was to draw formations, tutorials in the early stages of the development were focused on this feature but it flooded the first level with too much information.
We analyzed the essentials for gameplay and streamlined the control system to its minimal expression, so we decided to build a first level where your brush gets stolen and you can't draw.
This allowed us to omit some UI and controls during the first tutorial level, making the onboarding process much cleaner and more user-friendly.
Also having an enemy steal your brush, gave the mechanic greater narrative weight and anticipation.
Breaking design rules
We established a visual language where the final objective is usually located at the highest area of the level.
This rule is followed throughout four campaigns, but since the undead faction is associated with necromancy, underground, and death, I decided to invert the rule during their levels to achieve contrast, endowing them with more personality and reinforcing the narrative.
Gallery
