BattleBlock Theater: Momentum Monster

Design Portfolio

Momentum Monster is a free DLC playlist for BattleBlock Theater that I led the creation of as Lead Level Designer. My goal was to create playlists that seamlessly continued the difficulty progression from where the main game ended, while following the design principles we had established. Below, I’ll talk a bit about how I determined level and sequence placement as well as other decisions that went into the playlist. I won’t go into my specific design process here, but if you would like to read about that please head over to my BattleBlock Theater portfolio page.

I just have to say that this pack was REALLY well designed. Very difficult (especially finale-2), but genius level design. Great job on this pack :) - Steam User

I just spent way more time than I should have beating this. Was it worth it? Yes, yes it was. - Steam User

Not bad - Steam User

I had lots of fun doing this, and all of the deaths were my fault. The levels were very fair. - Steam User

Designing a Solo Playlist

Theming

In order to create a playlist that felt cohesive and unified I decided to focus the theme on player momentum; levels that maintained a relatively high tempo while not causing player fatigue. This gave us a direction to go with our prototypes and allowed me to more easily arrange levels and sequences. Having a unifying theme also allowed me to scatter around a few differently themed sequences as a way to keep things interesting and varied for the player.

Difficulty Progression

The below graph shows my target difficulty progression moving through the playlist. Levels within Acts are loaded sequentially, and after completing an Act the player is returned to the theater lobby. This creates a natural break for the player and a clean way to vary the difficulty curve and create interesting variation between Acts. This steady uptrend through the Chapter also has regular difficulty valleys within levels to minimize player fatigue and create a more interesting and varied experience.

Base Difficulty and Resource Placement

A player needs to collect a minimum of three Gems and reach the exit block and complete a level. To ensure a consistent base difficulty level, and the accessibility that it brings, three Gems are always easily acquired through the main path of the level and positioned in ways to direct, teach, or reward the player (or all three).

Each level supports a maximum of seven Gems and one Yarn (another resource), so once the base difficulty was met the remaining resources could be used in more interesting and challenging ways without increasing the base difficulty. This allows the player to intuitively control their difficulty by choosing to pursue side challenges, as well as encouraging exploration and experimentation by giving them a reward.

Player Agency

Players are going to jump, explode, be digested, burn, fall, drown, etc, and that’s great! What’s not great is if they feel like they were forced to die, blindsided by something they didn’t know about or anticipate. Taking away that agency, that sense that they caused their failure as opposed to arbitrarily being failed, is a good way to ensure a player doesn’t play for long. When a player dies I want them to feel like it’s because they messed up and if they just try again they’re sure to get it.

One of the major ways to ensure this was to always give them safe areas to take a breather and consider things, which usually doubled as respawn points. The camera controls give a pretty generous view, so if a player is paying attention to their surroundings they should be able to plan for what’s around the next bend. Some players prefer to learn by dying - I mean doing, which is also fine, but they’ve had the opportunity to pause and consider things.

Tempo & Pacing

Tempo describes the amount of concentration the player needs to complete a level or sequence; a challenging twitch sequence is high tempo, and a puzzle with no hazards is low tempo. Too much of either extreme makes for one-dimensional gameplay that quickly gets old. In order to minimize player fatigue and increase gameplay variety, I made sure to vary the tempo both within levels and the playlist as a whole. This sequence variety and challenge bracketing hopefully gets the player in a comfortable flow state and keeps them playing.