This is one of our mid-game missions that came at the end of one of the Tours. The goal of this mission was to revisit the lessons the player had learned in the previous few missions (grinds, advanced flips, and manuals) with a series of quick challenges and end the mission with a big ender off one of the biggest launchers in the game as a bit of a fun reward. I also wanted to use this mission to highlight the parkade, as it’s a fairly unique location in the city where each level has different geometry to skate. The idea for this mission came from the movie “The Raid” with the player starting at the bottom of the tower, and having to work their way up each challenge level by level (internally we affectionately referred to this mission as “The skRaid”).

This mission is an example of one of the more explicitly step-by-step tutorials in the game. Editing clips and sharing them is a big part of the community aspect of this game so it was really important to make sure that players understood how to access and use the Replay Editor. The replay system has a lot of detailed tools, and going over each in depth would make for a text-heavy and tedious mission. So the goal of this mission was to surface the tool to players, and get them interacting with the basics. Just enough instruction to get them recording and sharing clips, and let players explore the other features of the tool on their own. Even though it’s a tutorial mission we still wanted to make sure that we’re showing the player cools things around the city, so we chose three spots and asked the player for some tricks that we thought would make for some cool clips. In contrast to the “Bust out the Bag” mission above, I wanted to make sure that we took the player to some more grounded or “realistic” spots in the city to fit with the real-life vibe of making skate videos.

This was a new mission that was added in for Season 2. In season 2 we had added a new flip trick, the Impossible, and a new location to to the city in the form of an underground Tunnel skate park. So the goals of this mission were to showcase this new tunnel area, along with some other underground areas that hadn’t been featured yet in mission, and to teach players the Impossible Flip Trick and the best places to perform them.

We also wanted to explore a more “soft touch" approach to tutorials in this mission. In the “Without the Footy It’s Fiction” mission above, you can see that the player is taught how to use the Replay Editor by loading into their own instance, with a series of step-by-step instructions. This is a process that we had used across a few of our launch missions to teach players how to do things. In this case we wanted to take a more narrative approach, with less strict guidance for the player. We simply place a tutorial hint at the top of the screen and give the player some space to try the trick out themselves. When it came to showcasing the tunnel, since it’s a long narrow play space, we broke it down into a few sections that the player can skate individually, and then finish with a challenge that puts it all together in a line.

This is an example of how we can use challenges to introduce new concepts to players. In Season 4 we added Finger Flips to the game, so we added this challenge to help break them down for players. A Finger Flip is a combination of a Grab input, and then a Late Flip Trick input. So in the challenge goals I asked for a grab, then a late flip trick to help show the two components of a finger flip, and then asked the player for two variants of a finger flip. In a challenge we can also pin a “Trick Helper” to the left side of the screen, which helps reinforce/remind players of the correct inputs.

No matter how good we are at our own game, there will always be players who are better. This challenge was my attempt to give those extremely good players something a bit tougher to complete. This challenge combines a difficult location with very technical inputs for the tricks to create an Own the Spot challenge that requires players to be extremely precise with their trick timing, but hopefully creates a pretty cool clip when you land it. Judging by the multiple reddit threads that this challenge spawned, it was successful.

There are two very general types of players in Skate. Grounded or realistic skaters who want to play the game like a simulation of real life. And then there are “thread the needle” type players who want to push the game physics to their limit and try to land ridiculous stunts that wouldn’t be possible in reality. This challenge is meant to appeal to the latter. This stunt is more about finding the right angles than landing complex tricks.

Sniper mission for the Arctic Fishing Village region in Kill Shot: Bravo. In this mission the player must kill an officer, but the officer is hidden until the player engages the enemies. Once the player engages them, the officer will appear, but the player must still take out the Gunner and melee enemies first. If the player takes too long, the officer will flee. Once the player kills all the gunners and melee enemies, a sniper appears to help direct the players attention to where the officer is standing.

The action-packed finale to the Casino Region in Kill Shot:Bravo! Very difficult mission that requires careful timing and precise aim to hit as many explosives as you can. It was a ton of fun to make!

Early Machine Gun mission for Region 39 of Kill Shot: Bravo. I designed it to be an easy mission, but the volume of melee units jumping toward the player down the alley gives the mission a sense of intensity. Energy shielded units provide cover for some of the enemies to get closer to the player. The snipers that appear periodically interrupt the player and force them to frantically search for the source of the laser, providing some white-knuckle moments in the midst of an otherwise simple "bullet hose" mission.

This mission requires the player to kill multiple sniper in a row. It is intended to be quite difficult, despite how straightforward it is. The only enemy is the snipers, who have escalating levels of armour, and the snipers spawn at a steady rate of 5 to 7 seconds. It is timed out so that the player can only miss one or two shots throughout the entire mission before the snipers begin to build up and overwhelm the player. So though the enemies appear at a steady rate, the intensity of the increases as the player gets further into the mission due to a sense of loss aversion. It is more of an endurance test than a puzzle. Creating the mission required many test passes so that every shot could be timed out perfectly. The speed of each shot, the time it takes to reload, the traversal time of the enemies, player rotation speed, and a little bit of wiggle room for a missed shot all needed to be taken into account so that the mission could ride that line between too easy, and impossibly hard.

The intent behind this mission is exactly what it would appear to be: a fun roller coaster! We add easier "Relief" missions throughout each region we release in order to give the player a break, especially after a particularly difficult mission. In this case, during the development of a "Mining" Region, one of the artists and I thought it would be fun to create an "underground roller-coaster in a sea of gold" (and maybe pay homage to Indiana Jones in the process). The first pass of this mission ended up being a lot harder than intended, and not in a good way. Enemies were difficult to track while moving at the high speed of the coaster. Also, the twists and turns that made the track interesting resulted in the player having major difficulty controlling their weapon. I added longer straight sections and slowed the player down at certain points to help mitigate this. I also placed enemy groups so that once a player turned corners or went down inclines, the enemies were right in front of them. Adding in a bunch of boxes of TNT helped make the mission easier as well while also adding to the action-movie flair of the mission.

One of the issues that arose while I was working on Pot Farm: Grass Roots (PFGR) was that our retention numbers weren’t as high as we would like. There were many factors that led to this, one being the lack of guidance and clear goals for the player after the First Time User Experience. The system of quests at that time was completely linear. You had to do one quest at a time and there was no way to look ahead at what you'd need to do in the future, or look back and see what you had done. This meant that there was a steady drop-off of players with every quest in the line. If a player was stuck on a quest, bored with it, or simply forgot about it, that was effectively the end of their interactions with quests. I audited every one of these linear quests to remove or adjust quests that were apparent blockers, but it quickly became clear that PFGR would need a new system to deliver quests to the player effectively.

I also wanted to develop a new type of live event. PFGR at that point had “Karma Contests” which were weekly contests where players could complete a set of repeatable actions for points that would place them on a leader-board. The higher they placed, the better their prizes were. However players were beginning to complain of fatigue with these contests, and often felt like they were being hopelessly outclassed by the top-tier players.

Both of these issues led to my development of the Quest 2.0 system. I designed the system and pitched it to the team. From there I lead a group of engineers and artists through the development and launch of the feature. There were a few core goals for this system:

First; to remove the linear nature of the current quest system and allow the player to have more than one active quest at once, as displayed by the center picture in the image above. This meant that players would unlock tutorial quests at the appropriate level to guide them through new features, and player progression wouldn’t be blocked by any single quest.

Second; to increase visibility on the quest actions and rewards. In the center image you can see that the player has clear indication, even in this “list” view, of their progress in the quest and the reward that they are working toward. If the player taps on any of the quests in the list they are taken to an info-window as displayed in the third image. There players are able to view more specific details of the quest step they are on, get hints on how to complete the quest from “Uncle Floyd”, and tab forward to the other steps in the quest to see what they need to do (and what they will gain) as they progress in the quest.

Third; to provide another live event system that was focused more on PvE than PvP. At the top of the center image is an example of a Limited Time Quest (LTQ). The tile is similar in base functionality to the regular quests, but with the addition of a timer and an overall progress tracker at the top. The player would have to race against the clock in order to complete each of the quests. The player would be given a slightly larger reward every few quests, with a Grand Prize waiting for them at the end. The LTQs allowed for players to “compete” in a challenge without having a top-tier prize denied to them by another player, like in the Karma contests.

The Quest 2.0 system was well-received by players. It has also increased monetization for PFGR while LTQs are active. It took a team of five people 3 months to finish development. It was a great experience both for the opportunity to design a feature from start to finish, and to gain experience leading a team.