a Top-Down Local PvP game
Role: Level Designer
Mowdown is a friendly Top-Down local PvP game where two neighboring dogs fight over the garden shared by their two houses riding lawn mowers.
Team: 14
8 weeks
UE 5
Project Role:
Level Designer
Whitebox in UE5
Competitor analysis
Sketching
Collab with artists
QA testing
Design documentation
Dogs on Lawn Mowers
Plants = Ammo
Couch PvP
Mowdown is a friendly couch PvP game, where you play as two dogs riding lawn mowers, picking up plants, using them as ammo and competing against each other over the garden shared by your two houses.
Each ammo type offers different benefits and players have to position themselves tactically, using their environment to gain advantage.
Gameplay
About Mowdown
Collaboration
Scrum
We conducted the production according to Agile principles and held the following rituals:
2-week Sprints with a clear goal
Sprint planning with tasks that lead to that goal
Build reviews to assess the state of the latest build
Sprint reviews and retrospectives to reflect on what we are doing well and what we need to change
Time tracking in Jira
We used the software Jira to track our development progress, including:
Tracking time individually for tasks created in Sprint planning
Counting velocity and drawing Burndown Charts to track the progress of the entire team in relation to the number of planned hours
Additionally, this data helped us adjust our workload and improve our planning in the consecutive Sprints.
Team Practices
Peer reviews
To be able to work well with each other teammate and maintain a healthy professional relationship and environment we held Peer review sessions to give and receive feedback on:
Our collaborative practices and what we might lack as a teammate
Our professional attitude and adherence to the team contract
The quality of our work
After these sessions each of us reflected on our feedback and formed action points for what qualities we need to improve in.
This was my first time developing a game in a larger team and I had to go through a lot of learning to be able to compromise on disagreements and conflicts related to teamwork and the game as well as to communicate my ideas and intentions in a clear and understandable way
In this 8-week period I improved massively in my professional collaboration skills and maintained a healthy professional relationship with my teammates.
Solving Disagreements
Aligned vision
The biggest unforeseen challenge of the project was how hard it was to communicate one’s idea of “the game” and align the visions of each teammate so that we knew we were working towards the same goals.
Discussions as well as design model breakdowns (such as the Zubek model or the gameplay loops model) proved to be great ways to get across what ideas everybody had in their had, as well as to understand how the rest of the team thought about the game.
Work with other disciplines
This was my first time in a project working together with Environment art and programming and I had to learn a lot about our dependencies and how to communicate and work well with these disciplines.
It was crucial to define and acknowledge my own and their role and responsibilities in the team as well as to understand their perspective and goals for the project.
Constant communication, asking for feedback and discussion were the keys to achieve this.
Challenges
Research and Concept
In this game whoever manages to position themselves the best to shoot and to avoid getting shot wins. Players have to think tactically and the Level Design serves to reinforce that using corridors, chokepoints, points-of-interest, covers and so on.
Tactical Positioning
Resource-Driven
Besides tactical movement the game revolves around gathering different ammo types by picking them up. The placement of these pickups in the level serves to create intense tactical scenarios where players have to fight over resources and use different ammo types in combination with the environment.
Readability and Simplicity
To allow the players to assess their environment and think tactically all affordances and gameplay options need to be clearly visible: what gives cover, what can you pick up, where is the edge of world, etc. To achieve that we strove to create simple, elegant and easily assessible layouts.
Level design pillars
To determine what forms of gameplay and player experience we aim to create with our game as well as to draw inspiration and identify our target audience we took a look at the genre of Top-Down Tank PvP games and assembled a list of reference games that would help us solve design problems throughout the development.
After that we analyzed the games from that list, guided by research goals and questions, then wrote down our findings in a Research Document.
Reference Titles
Reference Games
Research Document
Game Research
Sketching
Throughout development I made sketches to concept ideas and to communicate them to the team. Clear sketches with good visual communication proved to be a great way to share and develop gameplay ideas.
Initial sketches of early map ideas
Iteration sketches based on newely developed gameplay elements, such as the Bouncy Bullet and the Landmine
Testing
Heatmap tool output after a playtest
Our QA plan:
A Conditions of Satisfaction document to track the progress of features
Organized internal and external playtesting sessions
Playtesting goals and questions prepared
Data-gathering tools such as a heatmap tool (created by our programmer) to better analyze player movement on the maps and determine what LD ingredients fulfill their purpose
Iteration logs to document playtest findings and create an iteration plan
Our last LD iteration log
Quality assurance
Project reflection
I had a great time with this project and improved my collaboration as well as design skills massively. A lot of aspects of game development I encountered for the first time here, thus I had a lot to learn. My biggest learnings related to:
Working with other disciplines
Learning the perspectives of my teammates from environment art or programming was a process essential for good collaboration. I experienced for the first time how for example the goals to achieve good aesthetics and fulfill the design intent can clash in team member priorities. How to communicate those conflicts, set team priorities and compromise if necessary were all important things I learned in this project.
Gathering and assessing useful data
Conducting playtests took a lot longer than I anticipated and assessing the feedback even longer. On the other hand the data gathered in these playtests was the key to make significant improvements for the game, so I concluded that dedicating enough time to quality assurance and having this in mind while planning is crucial.
Being receptive to feedback and acting on it
We held 2 Peer review sessions in this 8-week project, so that we could check in the 2nd session how well we acted on the feedback since the 1st round. I found that this feedback represents how good of a team member, how efficient of a collaborator I am in the eyes of my peers and so I took it to heart and was glad to hear in the 2nd peer review how they noticed me to have improved in a lot of regards.
