Mateo San Miguel
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Game Designer
Designing for Expo
The majority of my time went into designing the core of the game, including its design pillars and most of the base systems. We knew the game would be played at Falmouth University's Game Expo, meaning it would be played by all kinds of people with varying experience with games.
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Knowing this, we based most (if not all) of the game's design around providing a fun experience for the event. Our core pillar, "easy to learn, fun to master", informed all important design decisions.
Cleptonauts is a short, 1-3 player, couch co-op adventure, in which you (and your co-workers) work for Cleptocorp, a totally-not-evil company, and help them expand across space by visiting planets, collecting resources, and "dealing with" the local wildlife.
Having a variable player count meant we had to put extra work into balancing difficulty, resources, score, etc. along with common problems this genre of game can have such as players getting in each other's way and snowballing.
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Adaptive Difficulty
In an attempt to accommodate for different levels of player skill and variable player counts, I, alongside our other designer and a programmer, designed a 2-layer adaptive difficulty system which consolidated our design.​
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The system basically let struggling players get back on their feet without extreme punishment and gave high-skilled players enough challenge to match their skills.
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In its simplest terms, the gameplay loop has the players fuelling a rover, which they must escort and keep topped-up until it reaches its destination. As they escort the rover, enemies will show up which get in the way of keeping the rover topped-up, forcing players to deal with them​.​​​
Under the hood, the rover triggers hand-placed enemy spawners along its path, meaning that the faster the rover is going the more often the players come across enemies. This first layer was an elegant way to design for varying skill levels, but adding another simple layer to the system made it feel infinitely better.
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The second layer would look at the amount of enemies on-screen at a set rate and then spawn more enemies until there were enough to fulfil a "difficulty quota". This second layer complemented the first, intensifying its effect, and overall making it more responsive to players' performance.
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Adaptive difficulty eventually let me easily make and implement adaptive music and let our programmer implement leaderboards both of which massively improved player experience.​
Accessible Controls
Following "easy to learn, fun to master", we designed the game with a 2-button (and a joystick) control scheme. We designed intuitive contextual actions and made multiple buttons perform the same actions. Both of these decisions clearly proved their value at Expo.​​​
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The interactive tutorial was also crucial for Expo, and it was extremely effective at showing players the basics. Of course, to accommodate high-skill players we also added some extra mechanics, and strategies, only some of which can be found in tooltips in-game.​​​
​​​For example, more creative or experienced players quickly realised they could mine faster together or throw fuel into the rover instead of walking up to it, but only a handful figured out more advanced strategies like setting up on mission start, stashing resources, kiting, etc.​
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It was super rewarding as a developer seeing all kinds of players appreciate different aspects of the game specifically designed for them.