Poppy Playtime - Chapter 5
Huggy Wuggy Chase
Gameplay Video Coming Soon…
Integrating a classic Poppy-style character chase at the start of the game without alienating non-seasoned players.
Designing entry-level tutorials without disrupting the flow of the chase and keeping tension high.
Showcasing the new environment biomes while maintaining a cohesive blend from the end of the previous Chapter.
The beginning tutorials underwent several iterations to keep the pacing and player actions in tune with the Huggy chase. I constantly brought up concern during playtests regarding non-seasoned players or altogether new players to the franchise, especially given how easy it is for us as designers and developers to “get good” at our own games when we already know what to do.
Most of the chase elements were planned explicitly with picture and media reference, my primary inspiration being the ending of the original Terminator (1984) film, inside the factory. The Huggy chase here derives from the same notes of the unstoppable blue killing machine ripping through a poppy flower processing sector that is being kept active.
Additionally, I specifically wanted to include a chase section that served as an homage to the Huggy chase in Chapter 1 - one of the all time top fan moments of all Poppy Playtime. This is the first time that the player has interacted with Huggy since the original Chapter 1 chase, and a moment like this felt absolutely necessary to complete the emotional draw of the player experience.
Layout & Greybox
Starting hot off the end of Chapter 4, the beginning of Chapter 5 is intended to continue the thematic poppy flower story as the player enters the Labs section of the Playtime facility. Some challenges of this level included:
Greybox Walkthrough
Gameplay & Tutorials
I performed the majority of all gameplay implementation, including some animation and SFX implementation. I found a lot of opportunity while the level was in greybox to introduce one-off events to enhance the player experience, such as collapsing walkways, crashing the player through gratings, and additional scares from Huggy. Ultimately, the chase ended up feeling like designing an interactive roller coaster.
The planned chase events were successfully translated into the gameplay with little deviation, with the intended player experience driving the flow of the level through environmental design cues. Most of the environmental design was intended to guide the player with shape language and color. Huggy’s chase speed is guided by a “springing” tool that’s been tuned to keep Huggy within a specified distance of the player at any given time. Overall, Huggy’s implementation is a mix of hand-crafted pacing, automated speed support, and carefully placed animation pathing.
Creating a tutorial level combined with an active chase proved very challenging, and was treated with multiple types of disguised player assistance across different chase sections:
Delayed lethality, allowing the player to engage with basic tutorial actions while Huggy is artificially delayed from fully engaging with the chase
Perceived danger, where the player is physically separated from Huggy without removing him from the player’s view or vicinity, while the player performs tutorial actions under the perceived threat of Huggy
Tuned-down chase segments where Huggy is fully engaged with the chase, but heavily tuned to be much more forgiving than later in the game
The order of tutorials was deliberately planned so as to start with the most basic game actions (Run, jump, crouch) before moving into Poppy Playtime specific interactions using the Grabpack. Each type tutorial action in the level is repeated shortly after with a non-tutorial version to help reinforce player learning.
Final Paper Map
Level Top-down
Elevator Fight
The finale of the game’s opening traps the player in an elevator while Huggy desperately stabs at them from the outside. This sequence was directly inspired by the Terminator 2: Judgment Day scene of a similar nature. On the chopping block at one point in development, I was able to pitch the scene back into greenlight with some help from our Game Design lead at the time. The gameplay and pacing were put together almost exclusively by myself and one of our talented Game Designers, where we managed to save a ton of technical debt on the sequence by stripping down the mechanics to a tailored player experience:
Re-using animations from elsewhere in the game allowed us to forego new gameplay animation requirements
Clever mechanic setups prevented us from needing additional Environment Art scope
Self-sufficiency in gameplay scripting gave us total freedom to tailor the experience exactly as we needed it
In the end, this elevator sequence turned into a great, scary player experience of helplessness that tied off the level with style, especially after being saved from the cutting board.
Chase Tuning
Most iteration time on this level was spent tuning Huggy during the chase segments. There is an immediate balance problem with any chase - if the chaser is too fast it locks out lower-end players (“bad” gamers, new players, younger audience, etc.) however if the chaser is too slow then the experience is significantly lessened for high end players. The larger of the two in our case was high end players outrunning Huggy and causing him to look bad too far behind. To solve this, the programming team provided a tool on Huggy that allowed me a few variables to speed him up if the player exceeded a variable distance. I would place several of these triggers along each chase segment, specifically tuned to support the player’s current focus, such as tutorials or environmental hazards.
