ESCAPE ARTIST
Entry in the Ubisoft Competition
Escape Artist was a game that my team and I submitted to the 2019 Ubisoft Game Lab Competition. I worked as a lead designer on a team of 8 to create a dungeon-crawling looter, where the aim of the game was to steal as much treasure as you could manage from a well-known art gala, without being caught.
FEATURES
LOOT AND SNEAK
With varied value of treasure, the player could sneak around cameras and guards, pilfering anything they could fit in their pocket.
RANDOM GENERATION
All of our levels were generated randomly, allowing for a new gameplay experience every time.
TWITCH INTEGRATION
Full Twitch integration so viewers can influence things like enemies and treasure value in the game.
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
The design process for this game was different than most of the other projects I have worked on. For the first time, we were given major requirements and constraints that forced our design to reflect the intent set out by Ubisoft themselves. The following details my work as a designer on a team through our development process.
CONCEPTING A DESIGN
When we were first tasked with creating a game in 10 weeks from Ubisoft, our humble team of 8 started brainstorming a million clever ideas that we thought could be potential starting points. What we weren't ready for however, were the biggest curveballs thrown at us by the competition: the theme, and the requirements.
The Theme was one word: Spectacle. Interpreted however we wanted, we set to work drafting out what made a spectacle. As appointed lead designer, I began to look to other games for research and after lots of discussion we determined that our definition of spectacle was something exciting that people like to watch. Thus, our idea for an Art Heist was Born.
The problem we faced with the requirements however was that our game needed to have audience interaction of some description, using Twitch, which is touched on later.
GAMEPLAY
I wanted to design a game that was fun to watch every time it was played, not just the first time. The definition of a spectacle to me was something that was always exciting to watch and enjoy.
So I designed the random generation system in the game, and everything became randomly generated; from the room layouts, to the places of treasure, to the guard paths, and even the map itself. This created a greater sense of spectacle, and replayability.
The focus on the game became the player's interaction with the art gala on a room by room basis. Stealing treasure, disabling guards, and dodging traps. This gameplay loop proved to be very successful and players enjoyed competing for the highest amount of treasure.
ONLINE INTEGRATION
After Designing a game that I felt had lived up to the theme of spectacle and was fun to play, we also had to tackle the online integration factor. I decided that it might be best if we had the spectators of our game split into two teams when they were watching; one team that could help the player, and another to sabotage them.
Our lead network programmer suggested having a linked website that could display a twitch stream and have interactable elements for the audience to participate with. This emerged into the design of our website, that integrated directly into our game.
Players could connect to the website, be randomly assigned a team, and interact with the player by changing the price of treasures, spawning guards, opening doors and more.
DESIGNER DOCUMENTS
Several of my design docs from the length of this project.
Master Design Doc
View
Game Flow
View
Audience Interactions
View
CONCLUSION
Learn More
The whole process helped better my skills as a designer, and we walked away as a team that was proud to participate and receive several nominations in the Ubisoft 2019 Game Lab Competition.
If you want to read about the full development process and how we did in the competition, check out my blog post in the link above.