Instant Sports Paradise
Summer is here! With family and friends, INSTANT SPORTS Plus takes you overseas, under the sun of a paradise island. Share a multitude of sporty and fun experiences without leaving your home.
​
Team up, challenge your friends or try to beat your own records by breaking your limits.
Play with up to four local players in 15 mini-games and sports activities are waiting for you.
-
Breakfirst Games Developement Studio.
-
Developed in 7 months.
-
Using Unity.
-
Official Nintendo Switch Release.
-
Localized in 8 languages.
-
I worked on the level design of the main island.
-
I worked with the Nintendo DevKit.
Main Island
Global Improvements
Main task
The main island, where the player spends of the time exploring playing and looking for resources, was created by game artists as a first version and so it had many flaws and rough edges.
​
My job has been to come up with improvements and changes to the island to make it more enjoyable and interesting for the player to explore.
Testing the island
I started by giving the controls to my little brother who never played the game and told him to explore the island.
I watched him play taking notes on different points:
-
When he got lost
-
When he got stuck
-
When he went in a dead-end
-
Many other rough edges and points of
​
And I planned the modifications accordingly.
Planning the changes
I couldn't do the modifications myself, so I had to explain to the game artist in charge of the island which modifications to do and why to these modifications is best for the game.
​
I presented three main changes for the island:
-
Creating new paths instead of some dead ends.
The reason behind this proposition is that due to the camera and the layout of the island it seems like some paths go on but they suddenly end.
​
-
Moving some elements that were obstructing the camera view.
The camera was positioned in a way that while walking the avatar would sometime be hidden from player's view and it was too long to change the camera system.
​
-
Filling some spaces that just felt empty and dull.
One of the game's aim was to reward exploration and discovery, but there was many zones that the player would pass through with nothing interesting to see or do.
Zones where the environments leads the player to a dead-end.
Zones with environment elements obstructing the avatar from the camera.
Empty zones with no environments, rewards or ressources.
Collectibles
Collectibles repartition
To fill in his notebook, the player must obtain each type of collectible.
I had to design their repartition and location on the island. I follow a couple of rules to keep the repartition coherent and logical for the player: bugs appear near trees and flowers, rocks near the moutains, the rarer the collectible it is the farther it is from the most common area of the island.
Insects collectible UI.
Design Techniques
Negative Possibility Space
I tried to mitigate negative possibility space as much as possible, knowing the game was aimed at a young public I didn't want to enter a space expecting to get a reward and end up with just an empty dead-end.
Negative Possibility Space - Extra Credits
Encouraging Exploration
When creating the challenges, I made sure to place the harder challenges and the rarer occurrences of insects, fishes and minerals to be off the main path to invite the player to explore the island and look everywhere for the rare bug missing from his notebook.
Rare insects are hiding in the trees, of the main road.
Conclusion
This game was my first experience working and designing on a level professionally.
I liked the way I proceeded: I had to convince the other designers and artists that there was room for improvement on the main island. After they let me work on these improvements I had to explain why we needed to make these improvements to the game artist in charge of the island.
​
But I know using a different production pipeline, with for instance a level designer work on a blockout of the island first then have an artist dress it we could have gain some production time.