SNEAK OPS (2018)
|
|
|
|
Sneak Ops is a F2P arcade game that started as a personal project in 2017 and turned into Gritmaniac's first serious project and my first commercial game as a game designer. This is probably the project from which I have learned the most, and I have grown a lot as a designer and game maker in general.
The game was published by Noodlecake Studios in August 2018 and so far it has had more than 1 million downloads in the App Store and Google Play combined. My contributions to this game included:
|
|
My goal was to make a stealth game with arcade mechanics with touch controls. I had to make many compromises to achieve a simple game that could be played on a smartphone, avoiding on-screen buttons and joysticks and restricting the gameplay to just tapping on different spots on the screen.
I took a lot of inspiration from Konami's Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel for the core gameplay, but I had to make many compromises and simplify the stealth gameplay until we had a very streamlined design. Because of the vertical orientation of the screen and the semi-casual nature of the game (Mainly because I wanted Sneak Ops to be played on noisy and unfocused environments like subway trains) the camera was limited to vertical scrolling and this had a big impact on level design and the kind of stealth puzzles we could do.
For the meta and session design we wanted to do something similar to Nitrome's Leap day, but we ended up sticking to that too much and making a literal copy of their session design. This proved a mistake because platform games and stealth games can't have the same pacing, and also because players very rarely finished a level during their first sessions, which isn't too satisfying and had a negative impact on first day retention.
Someday we want to update this game and add a couple new gameplay mechanics and a few hundred new level chunks to add more variety. I also have plans to improve monetization a bit and making floppy disks the virtual currency of the game so the players can buy powerups and cosmetics by saving them instead of spending everything on checkpoints. I also want to improve the learning curve and customize level generation to different skill levels so first time users can have a more satisfying experience.
We went for a retro aesthetic but we mixed pixel art with voxels for the characters and other objects that needed to rotate in the Y-axis. This voxels were divided into 2D slices that were drawn stacked on top of each other to make a fake 3d effect. Not the best decision because animating the voxels is a very involved proccess but it does make the game look pretty unique.
I took a lot of inspiration from Konami's Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel for the core gameplay, but I had to make many compromises and simplify the stealth gameplay until we had a very streamlined design. Because of the vertical orientation of the screen and the semi-casual nature of the game (Mainly because I wanted Sneak Ops to be played on noisy and unfocused environments like subway trains) the camera was limited to vertical scrolling and this had a big impact on level design and the kind of stealth puzzles we could do.
For the meta and session design we wanted to do something similar to Nitrome's Leap day, but we ended up sticking to that too much and making a literal copy of their session design. This proved a mistake because platform games and stealth games can't have the same pacing, and also because players very rarely finished a level during their first sessions, which isn't too satisfying and had a negative impact on first day retention.
Someday we want to update this game and add a couple new gameplay mechanics and a few hundred new level chunks to add more variety. I also have plans to improve monetization a bit and making floppy disks the virtual currency of the game so the players can buy powerups and cosmetics by saving them instead of spending everything on checkpoints. I also want to improve the learning curve and customize level generation to different skill levels so first time users can have a more satisfying experience.
We went for a retro aesthetic but we mixed pixel art with voxels for the characters and other objects that needed to rotate in the Y-axis. This voxels were divided into 2D slices that were drawn stacked on top of each other to make a fake 3d effect. Not the best decision because animating the voxels is a very involved proccess but it does make the game look pretty unique.
Documents
|
In the early stages of the project I managed to keep a relatively updated game design document, but towards the end we just had too much in our plates with the direction, design, and asset creation of the actual game and we never made an updated document.
| ||
|
After the release I did make a document for the new update, but with my teammate working full time for another company now, we haven't managed to actually make this update yet.
| ||