Hello, how’s it going? We hope you’re having a smooth week. Everything is a bit chaotic for us but that’s just because we’re so close to the release date! Excitement is taking over in the studio.
In the past, we talked about how the game was shot, and the difficulties we went through to create our little experiment. Today we want to focus on how the routes in the game were planned and how important they are.
When we started to develop Idea, we had three key points in mind: it had to be a short, relaxing, and friendly experience. In order to achieve this, game design is fundamental. Usually, the workflow works in this way: first comes level design and, based on that, then you can set up the 2D/3D assets you need. But the rules were upside down with Idea. Our main asset was drone footage and we had to work our way to connect all the pieces together to make them fit.
Many elements play a significant role in how the game feels. This means that not only level design matters but stuff such as the mechanics based on physics or the transitions between screens - which lead us to insane mappings of the routes.
The picture above includes all the iterations and the different maps we made for Indicade, the Steam Fest, the Demo, and the full version. So, yes, the released game will be a whole new experience!
It was like building a huge jigsaw puzzle, but with each piece belonging to a different puzzle. We have a total of 123 clips - we use 2 of them in the menus and there are 7 linked to each one of the 7 endings. So this leaves us with 114 levels, and many, many connections between them.
In order to conserve our sanity, we created a set of rules to give coherence to the level design. The first one is related to how the lightbulb travels: it falls downwards constantly, therefore, we had to change our mindset. Instead of thinking on levels that go “from left to right”, as usual, we changed it to a “from top to bottom” direction, with constant movement. We call it the “Cascade design”.
The second one is related to the goals we wanted to set in the game for the players. Goals like discovering all the routes to travel, reaching the longest road, finding hidden secrets, or completing small quests. To create different experiences, we limited the available amount of “bounces” in the game. This way, players will need to play several times to reach less accessible places.
The map’s backbone is made of a few, simple roads. And then we added more complicated routes that will require you to show your skills. At the same time, we needed to respect the different biomes, so that players can feel the difference once they reach particular areas (highways, forests, rivers, …). But these differences are not only related to physical locations. Did you know that Ollie Huttunen had to stop recording footage when the winter season started in Finland? -20º was too cold for his drone to keep flying, but we were able to gather some footage during winter days, that’s why you’ll see so much snow on some of the levels.
As always, thanks for all the support,
Arturo Monedero, Head of TLR Games