Food
Fling
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Project Status: Completed
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Project Type: Team Project
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Project Duration: 6 months
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Software Used: Unity
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Languages Used: C#
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Primary Role(s): Lead Designer
About Food Fling
Food Fling is a 2 player online food fight game that was developed for my Bachelor's Degree in Game Development final year project. The game started off as an idea of trying to combine my love for food and action style multiplayer games, which evolved into this game in the end. This was essentially the first multiplayer game I had ever made, so I'll be sharing a few of the level mockups that was made and explain the reasoning behind the different iterations made
1st batch of iterations
These are the few iterations of the maps that I made for Food Fling when the project first started. Due to it being my first time ever designing a multiplayer game map, I ran into a few issues when designing the map:
The maps that were made with these first iterations did not evenly distribute the resources that the player needed to win in the game evenly between both sides. I wanted the game to have 2 different sides of the map where Player 1 and 2 would spawn respectively as a way to give safety to the player when they first start the game and not be knocked out or attacked immediately. I also wanted the map to have verticality to it.
These 2 wants for the game map posed some interesting challenges when designing them as my supervising lecturer mentioned a few times, the items that the player needs to pick up in order to fight in the game was not properly distributed. To attack in the game, the player would need to pick up food and throw them. That's a one time use thing and they would need to pick up another food to throw afterwards. This was an issue with these earlier maps as one side tended to have more food than the other, simply because I couldn't find space to evenly distribute them around the map layouts as they were kinda cramped.
The verticality part was also and issue where one side had more access to it compared to another and they did not seem to link up to one another. I wanted the top floor of the map to be connected to both sides as to give players more ways to go to either sides rather than just cross the bridge in the middle. This proved quite a challenge to balance.
2nd batch of iterations
These 2nd batches of iterations of the game were an improvement to the first ones, but still had issues with them in terms of giving advantages to certain players:
As mentioned above, although an improvement, these maps suffered from issues regarding the top floor of the level. As you can see, some of the maps had either little access to the top floor of the or too much of it on a particular side. At first thought after designing them, the map looked fine and the lecturer supervising the project also mentioned that it would be okay. But he also mentioned to test it out first as he feels there's still something wrong with it. And was he right.
During our playtest with the iterations of these maps, it became very apparent that more access to the top floor would mean an easy victory for the player. This was because of how the throwing food mechanic was done. Food can be thrown down but not up. So, players on the roofs could just keep throwing from the top while the ones on ground needed to constantly run for cover. We tried to get rid of this feature, but sadly couldn't.
There was also issues with map in terms of space given as some map would be too open and bare and would either cause too much of a disadvantage for 1 player or just felt to barren and off. With these issues in mind, these versions of the maps were scrapped right after our playtest was done and I headed straight back to the drawing block to fix it.
Final batch of iterations
This was one of the few final maps that was designed for the game that the team and I that was making this game project settled on after testing it with
After 20 different map iterations for the game, this was the final one that was decided to be used for the game. This was one of the 4 different map designs I had after the 2nd batch of iterations. The team and I tested out the maps all together and found out that this one worked best for what I had in mind for the game.
This particular map not only had an even spread of the resources that the players need in order to fight, but one side was not given more power than the other which worked out nice for the game's match length. The areas also felt wide yet packed enough to deliver the vibe and feel of a food festival battle arena that we wanted for the game. Each side of the map also had even access to the rooftop area so that either side could easily throw their food at those standing on the roof or the ground with plenty of cover to avoid it. Basically no "safe zones" around the map for the player to easily cheese or dodge food throws.
This map was also chosen to be the one we went for the game because during our playtest, the players in them managed to discover a few fun and rather unique strategies that they could do with how the food and access to the roof was laid out. It was fun to see how the players moved around the map and interacted with everything, so we decided to go with this map design for the final game as it not only met all the criteria that our map needed to, but more importantly, it was fun to play in.