OVERVIEW
Carl the Super Truck : Rescue Planes is a mobile video game intended for a young audience and based on exploration.
Here we can observe different places of the first map called "Day".
In order to move, the player will have to placer his finger on the screen in the desired direction, the avatar will then move automaticly to the "touch point".
On each map, you can find a multitude of events, these events are called "secondary events", some will be animations and some will change the avatar state or his environment during a short period of time.
Here, for instance, the environment will tarnish and rain will appear when the player comes accros a group of clouds.
The player will also be involved in what we called "primary events" that are in fact mini-games that will occur at regular intervals. This next capture shows one of these mini-game where the objective is to capture every leaf on a tree using a vacuum.
There's a total of four maps available to the player, these maps offer different types of environment, as well as different primary and secondary events.
Here is presented the maps menu.
In order to run through all these maps, the player will have the choice between six vehicles with different characteristics.
MAIN TASKS
■ Gameplay
Gameplay wise, I was in charge of balancing the vehicles in order to make them trully unique and different from one another. This way, we offered a variety of six very different vehicles to the players.
I also took care of checking every mini-game for various possible issues : making sure that the objective was always clear, making sure that they were always working on every new version of the game that was sent by the programmer, I also had to balance some mini-games that were judged too difficult for such a young audience after they were playtested.
■ Level Design
One of the most important task for the level design was to keep the player interested at all time. To do so, I tried to create a "path" based on several events, one leading to another, etc. The main point, as well as keeping the player concerned, was to prevent player from getting lost in the level. By leading him from an event to another, he/she would naturally expect to find a new one not far from the last one, setting a natural and unimposed objective for him/her.
After we organized playtests, we noticed that our primary events (the mini-games) were not noticed enough and that most player were not even playing them. The first structure let the player decide wether or not he wanted to play it So we figured that a good way of making sure that the player would enjoy themselves by playing those mini games, would be to place them at a specific distance from one another. By doing so, we made sure that the player encountered and played the mini-games. The distance between the mini-games also allowed us to make sure that the player had enough time and distance to explore the level.
■ QA testing
In the last weeks of development, one of my task was to look for potential bugs in the game and make reports to the programmer to facilitate their work before releasing the game.
After releasing the game, a huge bug was found on the iOS version, that bug was detected by using the Unity analytics, so I was in charge of figuring out what was the bug. I eventually managed to find it and reproduce it in a persistent way. As I was in constant talks with the programmer, it was only a matter of time before the bug was fixed.
