Heroic Gameday: Mission Designer
Before I was asked to lead the team I worked for a year as a mission designer!
For each mission I was responsible for the following:
Overall gameplay flow, focusing on creating a fun learning experience
Laying out and building levels within very tight performance metrics.
Writing dialogue scripts, gameplay documents, and art asset requests.
Communicating with programmers as they implemented gameplay logic based on my documentation.
Making edits to Lua scripts on my own as needed.
About the Game
Heroic Game Day is an educational MMO for kids. Kids play alongside a cast superhero NPCs who teach them new topics.
Built for Chrome browsers & Chromebooks, It caters towards low opportunity kids and is live in schools across the U.S. and India.
Kids can engage with single player missions, run around their school’s personal campus with friends, attack other schools in PvP game modes, and explore a constantly growing world.
Breakdown: Count Dinero - Income & Expenses
I created a pair of missions to cover the financial concepts of income and expenses. These missions introduce the concepts to kids more broadly. They feature Count Dinero, a superhero vampire who teaches personal finance.
Income - Caves in Chaos!
The town of Granite Hills is a tourist destination thanks to it’s caves containing glowing crystals. The main villain’s robots have attacked the caves. This has disrupted the town’s source of income.
Players speak with townsfolk who earn different types of income. The Mayor of Granite Hills hires the player to destroy the robots, allowing the player to earn income. The players destroy bots outside the caves and get ready to head inside.
Alongside regular rewards, players earn Cave Dollars a mission specific currency.
I designed the town with a few restraints in mind:
It needed to be very small to be performant but still feel like a place these characters could live in.
The NPCs needed to be easily found and navigation between them simple. There aren’t any alleyways or NPCs behind buildings for example.
We wanted to show off many different types of income which meant needing a diversity of buildings / occupations.
I had to use an existing set of modular home assets
Expenses - The Costs of Caving
The player enters the caves and needs to reach the end to destroy the robots. They dodge boulders while climbing a narrow uphill path. Players learn about expenses by choosing whether or not purchase powerups along the path. They spend Cave Dollars earned in the previous mission.
Powerups:
Pickaxes - destroy boulders that players collide with.
Juices - boosts the player’s speed allowing them to reach safe spots more quickly.
I designed these powerups to get players thinking about how to spend their money.
I created Cave Dollars to ensure players encounter identical spending choices, if we had used game-wide coins players would enter with different amounts.
This level went through a few iterations to get the timing windows right as the player moves from safe spot to safe spot.
If players spend recklessly, won’t be able to afford powerups near the end of the path.
They reach the source of the robots, destroy them, and activate the minecart tracks, allowing tourists to visit again. Thus saving the town’s income.
