Noble Sacrifices
Teaching Mechanics
Level Designer / Scripter
GAME: Starcraft 2
DEV TIME: 4 Weeks
GAME MODE: Single Player
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Design Doc
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Design
Overview
Level Objectives
Queen Infesting a Hive
I knew when I started designing "Noble Sacrifices" that I wanted to use the level as a tool for teaching the player how to properly utilize an important Starcraft II skill. Every race in SCII has a unique economic mechanic important to their success and, among these, the Zerg's mechanic of using Queens to Inject their Hatcheries with additional Larva is the least intuitive. Zerg player's global production rate is capped by the number of Larva they produce per minute, since every Zerg unit and building begins as a Larva. But since the inject ability isn't located on Hatcheries themselves and gives a delayed reward, many beginning Zerg players ignore or undervalue it.
To teach the importance and power of this ability, I wanted the mission to encourages the use of the Inject mechanic by putting pressure on the player's production capacity without putting pressure on their resources. The best way to do this is to require the player to make a lot of a cheap unit (Zerglings) in a short amount of time. To complete the level objective of sacrificing 100 Zerglings, the player must use 50 Larva in 12 minutes, even though each of the two Hatcheries the player has only produces about 60 Larva in that time naturally. Thus, to make enough units to defend their base while sacrificing the requisite Zerglings, the player must rely on the inject mechanic.
Level Layout
Another challenge beginning players face is the difficulty of managing two bases simultaneously. This challenge is heightened when a player wants to use the inject mechanic, which requires both base and unit management. To provide an opportunity to practice this kind of multi-tasking, I gave the player two bases to defend. Managing two bases in a defense mission is easier than managing two bases in a real game because the player does not need to actively attack an opponent, and so can focus purely on base management and unit production. Nevertheless, exposing the player to multi-base management in this kind of safe environment allows them to isolate and practice this skill.
Level Layout and Paths of Enemy Attack
Wave Balance
While the development time on this level was compressed, and prevented me from testing as much as I would have hoped to, I was still able to observe five players testing the level over two playtesting sessions. The biggest challenge in these tests was determining what an appropriate level of challenge was for the level, and for which skill level. Testers ranged in skill from Starcraft II veterans to complete novices. When I set out to create "Noble Sacrifices," I determined that I wanted the level to be targeted at intermediate players, who already knew the core rules and controls of Starcraft II but weren't at a competitive level. For this reason, I prioritized feedback from the three intermediate level testers who played the level.
After initial testing, I found that players who did well early and prioritized creating Zerglings were often able to breeze through the level without any challenge while players who did not do so were unceremoniously trounced by the level's final waves. To solve this problem, I added more difficulty "spikes" throughout the level, points where the player faced a real challenge and were forced to pay a lot of attention to defense. To balance these spikes out, I reduced the difficulty of the final waves and the waves in between spikes. While difficulty spikes might not sound like a good idea, in this circumstance they increased player interest by spreading challenge across the entire level rather than back-loading it at the end, giving the player more to pay attention to on a minute to minute basis. When I ran my second round of testing, these changes made the level much more interesting for testers, and made sure that players couldn't bypass the level by simply producing Zerglings at rapid speed.
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Communicating Objectives
Since the development time of this project was compressed, I wasn't able to do in-depth balance testing. Nevertheless, one issue I noticed early on was that many testers didn't understand the objective and challenges of the level quickly enough. Many testers took minutes to understand the level, by which point it was impossible for them to make a come back.
To address this problem I added two communication features. The first are a series of warning pings which mark the areas the AI are about to attack. This gives the player the ability to react to threats ahead of time, before they suffer catastrophic losses. The second is an opening cinematic which explains the level's premise, its objective, as well as a suggested strategy. While the idea of creating a cinematic on such a short time scale in a new engine was originally daunting, I found that by carefully outlining what I wanted the cinematic to show and by using
Starcraft II's excellent in-built cinematic tools, the process was quick and simple. Furthermore, additional testing showed that the addition of the opening cinematic greatly improved communication and the player's overall experience.
Using the Starcraft II trigger tool to create the cinematic. Using comments to recreate the outline
Cinematic outline notes