Peanuts: Snoopy's Grand Adventure
Role:
Year:
Platforms:
Lead Designer
2015
PlayStation 4, XBox 360, XBoxOne,
WiiU,
N3DS
Genre:
Platformer
Game Overview
A platformer tie in to the Peanuts movie of 2015. It was launched on five (!) different platforms which the same team developed in parallel.
Design Objectives
The design behind this one has a backstory. A few years before I'd enjoyed playing Spelunky with my young daughter. She couldn't handle the brutal precision platforming of that game, but loved playing with her dad as a ghost. Sharp eyed players will notice a few different homage to Spelunky's design hidden away within Snoopy's Grand Adventure. Controlling the Woodstock character has a lot of the ghost behaviour from Spelunky in it - helping the primary player and cannot be hurt.
Years later, I tried to recreate this experience for other parents who wanted to play with their children. The bosses don't have to be killed, just outlasted. The platforming was intended to be lighthearted and forgiving, something for younger audiences to enjoy without too much stress to be l33t.
Successful Features
This was system design from top to bottom. Modular components combined to make enemy ai, moving level elements, bosses, even grass blowing in the foreground was set up as a series of logic components by the design team.
The bosses were completely out of scope for this game, but I constructed them over months of painstaking work and sleepless nights... and they turned out pretty decent I think. After my experience on this project I've confirmed my belief that modular building blocks of logic to empower the design team to be inventive is the best way to make games.
Launching on five simultaneous platforms was gruelling work. A weird physics bug on the 3Ds had us in crunch for a week.
Framerate drops on the PS4 were a constant headache, but once we discovered the issue the level design team was too committed to work done to make large scale changes. Despite all these troubles we hit the release date set by the client for the film release - no minor feat.
Conclusion
Polemic is a good way to describe the critical reception. The hardcore players absolutely hated it, calling it boring. Younger players took it at face value and had a lot of fun.
The overall perception was positive, although the numbers wildly disparate. It also won an award for best game on PC / Console from VG Chile.
Development was brutal. 10+ hours a day including weekends for many months to hit the deadlines. The level design team asked me to help produce level content, but I had no energy left to get it done. There was just too much to do in too little time.
Considering the importance of this project at the time I should have managed more - delegated tasks better and distributed the load. I admit I was wary of doing so however since a large part of the design team had just finished another demanding project.
When all is said and done, I still remember the simple joy of showing my (now older) daughter the game and explaining where the design had come from.