Poppy Playtime - Chapter 5
Additional Content
Bron Reveal & Climbing Gameplay
Gameplay Video Coming Soon…
During greybox, an early section of the game was struggling to find the right shape for the quality we wanted to show. My lead asked me to step in and work on redesigning the section, consisting of two areas:
Boiler room designed around showcasing the fan-favorite Bron, as well as the setting for the player obtaining the new Grabpack, the primary player tool, and an all-new hand.
Elevator shaft intended to serve as a gameplay showcase between level beats.
Bron Reveal / Boiler Room
As the player searches for a new Grabpack, they find a large boiler room where the big-bodied Bron character is chained down and being eaten by smaller toys; trapped his mouth, a new Grabpack for the player. The Environment Art team spearheaded the composition and camera framing of Bron’s reveal as the player walks into the room. I contributed level design support and redesigns to the area:
Created a new traversal path to reach the upper catwalks of the room
Designed and implemented additional progression gameplay
Revised key Grabpack interactions
Once EA had their composition, I built a new section behind the reveal to accommodate Grabpack gameplay for progression blocking - not only from just the Grabpack, but also the new Pressurized hand. For this, I Blueprinted an interactive crane that can be pushed along its track using a variable amount of push force from using the Pressurized hand, and walked on as a bridge to reach the exit.
A standard Grabpack-pullable variant was later adapted to use to reach the Pressurized hand, rounding off a great micro-progression of game mechanics - starting with a standard hand interaction after obtaining the Grabpack, leading into using the new hand.
Climbing Gameplay
One of the most fun innovations on the standard Grabpack gameplay in Chapter 5 is a feature discovered by accident during testing. While designing the elevator section of the Research & Development level, it was discovered that the player can travel horizontally between two grab handles. Combined with the Grabpack’s extensive reach, this creates a unique type of interaction never before used in Poppy Playtime. At the request of the game leads, I was able to dedicate and design 2 sections of the game entirely around teaching and performing this type of grab handle gameplay.
The first chronological section is immediately following the Bron reveal, however this was also the second area that was designed for this. As such, this interactions needed to progress specifically to lead up to indirectly teaching the horizontal traversal action. The environmental setting was already established as an elevator shaft, letting me primarily use our new modular environment kit as a besline for the design. Through much trial, error, and deliberation, as well as a complete redesign from scratch halfway through, I ended up with the version seen in-game.
The majority of design polish until release focused on removing interaction edge cases that affected the intended clarity and path.
Train Tunnel Technical Prototype
Very early in development, I had created a prototype system for a scrolling environment tunnel to be used in general situations, by request of our level design lead at the time without any expectations, specifications or further prompting. Some features of the prototype I created include:
Scalable scroll time with options for infinite scrolling and completion via Event triggers
User-defined modules that can be swapped for any actor type
Procedural spawn and despawn logic based on start/end trigger placement
As the end of Chapter 5 began to take shape, my prototype was adapted for use in the train tunnel on an infinitely running loop during gameplay. The modified system can be seen in the final game during the train sequence at the end, completely engulfing the play environment of the train.