photon explosion.
An arcade fast-paced game about spreading your photons to take over other planets and survive
Role:
Technical Game Designer
Duration:
4 Weeks
1
Team Size:
design goals
Design a game that could be commercially successful
Explore game design for procedurally generated levels
Design fast-paced and arcady game
design for high KPI and low CPI
challenge
How to catch players attention immediately and keep them retained?
solution
Make the game snackable.
To make a game snackable, it needs to be something player can play anywhere and anytime, which means that it has to have a tight and short gameloop where the player doesn’t have to invest a large amount of time to understand it.
Example:
Peter is on the bus station and he is casually going through his phone and doesn’t know what to do to kill time. However, he suddenly sees Photon Explosion and remembered that time takes to play this game is short and the gameplay is very engaging, so Peter opened the game and played until the bus came.
The gameloop was designed to be short and tight.
It looks like the figure below:
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Increase visual dynamics helps reduce CPI because users are often attracted by a large amount of moving and colourful items.
CPI: Consumer Price Index
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gameplay/mechanics design
core mechanics
The core mechanics of Photon Explosion is to drag and drop photons to different planets for them to grow and maximize their numbers.
challenge
How can I expand on the core mechanics to add more variations to the game and make it enjoyable to play?
solution
Solidify the design pillars and gameplay loops then iterate on different gameplays to see if they fit.
Design Pillars:
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Numbers growing
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Fast moving objects
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Command large amount of objects
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Instant decision making
After testing dozens of gameplays, I solidified on the following:
Enemies

Power ups

Big planets

Big moving planets
Decision making process Before and After
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Before

After
outcome
Adds more variations to the game and tightens the main game loop.
design for procedural generated levels
challenge
How to design and balance the gameplay with infinite amount of levels?
solution
Make modular levels
Making modular levels means that I as a designer have more control over what I want player to experience.
What does a modular level mean?
Instead of making everything completely random, I made different sets of levels that are usually combinations of 7 - 15 planets and 1 - 3 power-ups with manually tweaked difficulty ranges from really easy to really challenging.

Easy module: 12 planets
11 small + 1 big
Medium module: 8 planets
6 small + 2 big
Medium module: 8 planets
6 small + 2 big
Hard module: 7 planets
6 small + 1 big moving
Hard module: 7 planets
6 small + 1 big moving
outcome
I get to control what player experiences instead of giving them completely random levels.
challenge
How to iterate on the balancing and the aesthetic fast?
solution
Make tools.
It is important for me to create a tool that allows me to change the balancing and the aesthetic of the game fast without going into each script and prefab. Therefore I created a customizable level/color editor that gives me control on the difficulty of the game depending on the progress player makes as well as the color for everything.
Below are some screenshots of the tools I made for Photon Explosion.
LEVEL EDITOR

General data allows me to control and change data of every prefab
COLOR PALETTE
Color palette tool allows me to change color of everything and apply instantly
POWER UP EDITOR TOOL

Power up tool allows me to change the description, color, name, prefab, and function of the power ups
a video demonstration of how my customizable color palette works
outcome
I’m able to use my time 10 times more effectively and made more iterations in the limited amount of time I had.
Player gets in the flow easily where their knowledge and skills are constantly being challenged while it’s not too hectic.

okay, so how did the game do?
The game turns out to be more successful than I expected, and attracted 2,500 users in total with a daily average of 200 users.
