Spirits & Spirits
Co-op bartender party game
Sound ON for the best experience!
"The dead rise... To party! Serve drinks to the restless souls, entertain them to keep them from wrecking your business!"
Project overview
A collaborative TGA-project by Pretty Fly.
Team
3 Animators
4 Graphical Artists
3 Level Designers
5 Programmers
2 Sound Designers
3 Technical Artists
Credits at the end of the trailer!
Time
9 weeks
Engine(s)
Clockwork
(custom engine)
My Contribution
Game Design
Level Design (two levels full ownership)
Level Art
Lighting
Part of metric, recipe, and scripted event taskforce
Trailer
Contribution example
Level art
As we opted for full ownership, I was responsible for designing the final levels of the game. The theme was "Hell let loose" and the challenge became to create something readable that also felt chaotic and like it was falling apart.
I tried to keep the playable space uncluttered, avoiding unnecessary flashing lights, effects, and noisy assets. Instead, these elements were placed outside the bar to give the impression they were creeping in. The moving platforms in the center of the levels fitted well into the theme of destruction.
The design was iteraded based on feedback, trying to intensify the "hell" theme. Warm lighting helped set the mood, and I placed point lights near the lava plane to push its sense of heat.
I think the final result turned out really well, thanks to good modular assets from our artists, minimizing unnecessary noise in the playable space, and the lighting blending everything too a cohesive color palette.
Level design
Our reference game for this project was Overcooked 2 and the “Night of the Hangry Horde” DLC, which introduced a horde mode where customers would try to break if not served in time.
I studied both Overcooked 1, 2, and the DLC, analysing which levels I thought worked well (and why), as well as those that felt frustrating or boring. I then cherry-picked ideas from my favorites and tried incorporate them to fit our scope and core loop.
Using Miro, I took charge in creating mockup modules for both brainstorming and level iteration. The mockup really helped to balance levels and imagine how they would play out, instead of jumping straight into the engine, potentially wasting hours.
A core design focus was to keep both players active at all times. During playtesting, I felt that levels where one player had to wait for the other to finish a task quickly killed the fun. To solve this, the recipe cycle needed to include stations where both players would need a similar amount of time to finish their tasks. This in turn required us to know which ingredients should be available and what the most challenging order would be for each level. Knowing this, I gave players different stations with recipes that would force them to work together.
Game design
As a member of the recipe taskforce, I helped creating flowcharts for the drinks. The recipes heavily affected the core loop of our game, and we had multiple discussions how the loop should work, how complex the recipes should be, and how closely we should follow our reference game. Sadly I think we took a wrong turn here, which I'll mention in my reflections below. The flowcharts did however help us to see potential issues with our loop and how much variation we could bring, and we used them to balance player progression and difficulty.
I was also responsible for balancing the recipes within my own levels, like difficulty progression between orders, and time between waves.
Reflections
I'm pleased with the early decisions we made, like reducing themes from three to two, which reduced workload and improved the quality. I'm also happy that I took several initiatives to structure our work, implementing Miro for level design and recipe flowcharts.
Our core loop of mixing drinks proved less intuitive than in Overcooked 2. Unlike making a pizza, mixing drinks wasn't immediately obvious to players. I also think our recipe complexity added unnecessary confusion. For example, a feature was that one ingredient could be used for multiple purposes, which I think is hard to explain to the player, can cause frustration, and puts more focus into the looking at the recipe. In retrospect, I would have advocated more strongly for simplifying recipes and creating a clearer gameplay loop.
My collab with Jacob Pihl on the trailer was very fun, and I think we managed to showcase both the game and peoples work in a nice way.
Our own engine and editor had also become a lot more stable over time so with this project, our work was more enjoyable and programmers was able to quickly set up a prototype in line with our reference game. The pipeline had also improved which allowed faster implementation with fewer issues.
As this was our fourth and final project together as a team, my biggest takeaway is that working on projects while developing a pipeline takes time. But as you get familiar with both the team and the pipeline, you start to see the same strengths and weaknesses and can adapt to them.
Gallery
