Cyberdrive 2077
Dev Info
Roles: Level Designer, Associate Producer, 3D Artist
Company: MassDiGi
Software Used: Unity, Maya, Substance Painter, Excel
Duration: May 2019-August 2019, January 2020-May 2020
Game Info
Genre: 3D Infinite Runner
Platform: IOS, Android (Formerly)
Project Status: Launched
My Contributions
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3D Modeled, textured, and Implemented new obstacles in Unity.
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Completly overhauled level design
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Created new documentation and guidelines for the project
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Used data to redesign which tiles
should spawn when
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Doubled our level retention and increased our Average Session Length by 25%
Level Design Process
After I overhauled the level design and guidelines of Cyberdrive, I created a short presentation detailing how to approach implementing obstacles into tiles, and how to use tiles throughout the different nodes. This presentation is the end result of experimentation and data feedback
Level Design Overhaul
The spreadsheet to the left is how tiles were being spawned in the older iteration of the level design.
As you can see, Nodes 2 and 3 had a dramatic increase in tiles. This led to a version of the level design that was too complex and confusing. There were simply too many tiles with different obstacles for players to keep track of.
The spreadsheet below is how I divided the tiles to spawn in the new iteration of the level design (How the tiles were rearranged is color-coded from the previous spreadsheet). Not only did this change lead to less confusing levels, but it doubled Cyberdrive's amount of content as well. The old version of Node 3 was now split into 3 separate nodes (Nodes 2, 3, and 6 as seen in the spreadsheet below).
This change was made due to our data that most players made it past node 1, but quit during node 2. I used node 1 as a base for all future nodes (which is the reason it's the only untouched node between both spreadsheets.
Tile Design Overhaul
(Before)
(After)
Our data showed that players would usually drop off at Node 2. This led me to hypothesize one of two things: Either the levels were too hard, or too complex (Feedback on Cyberdrive has never skewed towards it being easy or boring). With this in mind, I approached redesigning these levels by lowering the number of unique obstacles found in each singular Node, as well as creating more clear paths for the player to travel through. Above is an example of one tile's redesign. Among the paths being more clear, more obstacles animate to move up, out of the player's path.
After launching with the new version of the level design, our data had proven that the overhaul was worth making. Our average session length had increased, and players were now playing as far as Node 8 when the previous highest played Node was Node 4.
This slide is a snippet from our Post-Mortem, which can be viewed/downloaded below: