Cookie Point

Technical Game & Level Designer

Mobile casual game
In charge of:
  • Scripting (C#)
  • Tool development
  • Game Design
  • Level Design
Tools used:
  • Unity
  • Perforce (P4V versioning)
  • Trello

About

Cookie Point

Made in 2 months

‍Over this period of time, 4 teammates and myself designed, documented, developed, and balanced Cookie Point. It's a casual mobile game based on the model of Two Dots, a game where you have to connect dots of a same color.
Our mission at Nvizzio was to prototype a similar game using 2D art from the Unity asset store.

High quality prototype

‍Cookie Point has a real FTUE experience from the very beginning. We wanted to focus our effort on the player experience by developing an easy-to-learn but hard-to-master gameplay. By doing so, the player would feel highly rewarded when completing a newly unlocked level.
We designed and polished the first 30 levels of the game, basing our balancing on player feelings. The levels are set to be completed or failed with only very few moves left to the counter. The objectives and mechanics vary while the player progresses through the game.

As a Tech designer

‍My job was firstly to brainstorm, analyze the market trends, and iterate on ideas with the team to find an appealing concept that would follow our guideline, following Two Dots example. This part took us a week.Once we were set with the idea, I started designing a tool to help us with the game's level design. The idea was to have a grid in the unity inspector that we would fill with color information.
Once the game started, our color grid would be shown on a level in game.
Later in production, I added multiple grid customization options to the tool that would let the level designers create a new experience for each level of the game.

Technical dev

The image on the left is a screenshot of the tool I developed for level creation. It's divided into 4 main parts:

  • The first one is a 2D array grid of integers. It's resizable by changing the X and Y values by clicking the three dots to the right. It's in that part that the level designers will choose the grid size and fill in the desired color for the newly spawned macarons.

This first element is communicating with the second one.

  • The 'Color selection' part is where you choose which color can be spawned on the grid while playing. Each boolean is a reference of a color indicated just below in the info text box. If a designer doesn't fill one of the integers in the 2D array, the tool will decide to place a random color between the one selected.
  • The third part is a class where we store the different objectives for that level. Each objective element contains an enumeration of every color available, a first integer equal to the amount the player has to reach to complete the objective, and finally a debugging part showing the objective actual value in game and a completion status.

After the objectives, an integer with the total available moves for the level and the 3 integer values setting the goal to unlock each star. These last 3 integers are not shown to the player as integers but as a completion gauge in game.

  • The fourth element is about the level visual customization. The first integer is setting the spacing between each macaron on the grid, the second one, the overall scale of the grid and its elements, and finally, the last integer is set to move the grid along the Y axis in the game view. These 3 parameters allows the level designer to adapt the grid size to the in game HUD.

There is a last part in that tool containing saved information. It simply tells if the level is completed and if the tool should unlock the next one passing through scenes score information.

Maxime Argon | © 2023, All Rights Reserved.
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