The Design of Looters - The Good, the Bad & the Greedy

[p]It is no secret that making any kind of video game is hard. With that said, designing a game for two players like Looters comes with its own challenges. For instance, what’s the best way to encourage cooperation between players? How do we prevent players from going their separate ways in an open level? What do we do if one is stuck somewhere and the other keeps going? What draws the players together? All of these questions, and many more, have to be addressed; that’s where the Design Team comes in.[/p][p]From left to right, top to bottom: Léo (Encounter Designer), Émile (Creative Director & Game Designer), Rachel (Lead Level Designer), Justin (Economy Designer), Julien (Scenarist), Hervée (Level & UI Designer), Francis (UX Designer), Danaël (Level Designer), and Nathan (Level Designer)[/p][p][/p][p]At Partners in Crime, we currently have nine designers working on different aspects of the game. This blog post will cover the main design fields and how they all work in collaboration to achieve the best version of Looters we can imagine![/p][p][/p][h2]Game Design: Thinking like a Loot Goblin[/h2][p]Émile, Rachel and Hervée are among the original game designers on the team. They defined and prototyped the core game mechanics. In other words, what the Goblins can actually do in the game. Can they walk, crouch or throw things around? Can they jump and, if so, how high? Which buttons do players need to press to perform these actions? (We got a lot of headaches over this one, believe us… 🫠) But it’s all part of the process![/p][p]Game designers also work closely with User Experience (UX) Designers like Francis to craft the gameplay loop, or the repeating cycles of objectives, actions and rewards the players will go through. For instance, in Looters, the core gameplay loop follows this simple four-step structure:[/p][p][/p][h3]LOOT ITEMS ➡️ SCORE POINTS ➡️ UNLOCK LEVELS and then 🔁 REPEAT[/h3][p][/p][p]The gameplay loop is what marks the progression in the game — meaning that for every completed loop, they must receive some sort of reward, whether it be an upgrade in skills, a cosmetic change or the unlocking of new levels. Without a solid gameplay loop, the players have little to no motivation to keep playing. That’s why Hervée, who has a natural talent for mockups, made a first version of the levels end screen that will display the Goblins’ looting score, respective death counts and emotes count. Once finalized, this User Interface (UI) mockup will be polished and perfected by our UI artists.[/p][p]In the end, UX and UI Designers have to constantly find new ways to cultivate player motivation through engaging loop cycles that offer variety in gameplay, narrative, aesthetics and other areas. Like Goblins (the clever, tinkering kind), we have to get creative and patch together smart solutions to design problems as a team. It’s less “chaos gremlin energy” and more “scrappy problem-solvers sharing one brain cell — productively”.[/p][p]
Level end screen mockup designed by Hervée[/p][p][/p][h2]Encounter Design: Shaping Behaviors[/h2][p]Léo is our only Encounter Designer on the team. He is in charge of designing the artificial intelligences (AIs), defining their range of behaviors and the way players can interact with them. Since we have four AIs in the game, this represents a ginormous workload. On a daily basis, Léo has to work hand in hand with level designers, programmers and animators and to ensure every step of the AI pipeline creation is aligned with the overall vision for the game.[/p][p]Léo, Encounter Designer, in deep thinking in front of his Behavior Tree[/p][p][/p][p]The Behavior Tree (BT), Léo’s favorite tool, is like an AI code of conduct. Without a BT, our Cultist AI wouldn’t be able to manage priorities and switch between finite sets of tasks, called States. The BT organigram made of little blue and purple boxes can easily look chaotic from the outside perspective. Getting lost between the numerous branches and oddly named States when looking at Léo’s screen is not unheard of… Therefore, we recommend keeping the encounter designer happy at all times by fuelling him with copious amounts of coffee so that he can demystify the strange behaviors of your game’s enemies at once. ☕😌[/p][p][/p][h3]🗨️ ‘’You must first confuse yourself to confuse the enemy.’’
— Léo, Looters Encounter Designer[/h3][p][/p][p]Whether it be a deadly Cultist patrolling the Manor, an innocent Lamb running around the Kitchen or a greedy Rat stealing loot from our Goblins, every encounter has to be prototyped, tested and iterated until the difficulty level feels right for the target audience. For instance, the Altar room from Looters would be almost impossible if the Goblins didn’t have access to the Cape mechanic that lets them blend in with the red hooded antagonists. Seamless, don’t you think…?! 🥸[/p][p][/p][p]In Looters, Goblins can stack on each other and wear a red cape to hide among Cultists.[/p][p][/p][p]When your friend gets hexed by a Cultist, their soul will start leaving their body (yes, spooky, we know). You can rescue your friend by smashing the X button with the kind of rage that makes your controller fear for its life. As you can imagine, balancing this mechanic is also part of the encounter designer’s work and leads to repercussions on player agency, level layout, visual effects and character animation.[/p][p][/p][p]The ‘’Rescue your friend’’ mechanic was originally designed by Léo and prototyped in collaboration with programmers[/p][p][/p][h2]Level Design: Building a Coherent World[/h2][p]Level designers are the ones who establish the core metrics that ensure consistency in gameplay. By metrics, we mean everything from the Goblins height and width to the maximum distance at which they can pick up an object. At the start of a production, these metrics are typically pretty flexible; but the more the game gets refined, the more fixed they become.[/p][p][/p][p]Lead Level Designer Rachel reviewing a level blocking[/p][p][/p][p]In addition to this, the level designers plan out the levels in 2D, either on paper or using softwares like Photoshop, Miro or Figma. After iterating, they bring the levels to life in 3D within the game engine. This step is usually referred to as ‘’greyboxing’’ or ‘’blocking’’. A level can remain in this greyboxing state for as long as it takes before it is officially locked and made ready to be dressed by the environment artists, which will make it look unrecognizable, in the very best way possible! ✨[/p][p][/p][p]The very first blocking done by Level Designers Hervée and Rachel when initially prototyping the core mechanics for Looters[/p][p][/p][p]In Looters, there will be a total of four different levels, each with its own mechanics, encounters, aesthetics and secrets (🫢). No matter the level, our Goblins only desire one thing: loot as much shiny stuff as possible without being detected by the crimson figures we call the ‘’Cultists’’. We don’t want to spoil too much before the full game release, but here’s a teaser of each level:[/p]

[p]⛪ The Grand Hall, by Rachel; The start of the heist and the very first time our Goblins encounter the red hooded figures patrolling the Manor and guarding the precious loot.[/p]
[p]📚 The Library, by Nathan; An enchanting and brainy parkour to find the most valuable artifacts through mazes of books, greedy rats and moving staircases.[/p]
[p]🍽️ The Kitchen, by Hervée; The most chaotic and otherworldly soup recipe you’ll ever make, quite literally.[/p]
[p]🌱 The Greenhouse, by Danaël; Sentient plants, cottagecore magic and talking trees — who thought the Cultists had green thumbs?[/p]

[p]Topview of the Kitchen’s level and its delimited rooms, made by Level Designer Hervée[/p][p][/p][h2]What’s Next?[/h2][p]Of course, Looters could not come to fruition without many other design departments that we couldn’t cover here today, such as economy design, technical design and narrative design. With that said, we must remember, as designers, that even the smallest of changes in a game’s features may have an impact on the Art Team as a whole.[/p][p]Work in progress of the Kitchen’s level blocking, by Hervée. See how blockings like these transform into the fully realized in-game environments next week, thanks to our environment and prop artists. [/p][p]
With that in mind, stay tuned for next week’s blog post, heisters, as we’ll be diving into the Art of Looters, especially environment and props!
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