Lego Star Wars Castaways | Brynn's Game Design

Developer: Gameloft

Platform: Apple Arcade

Engine: Gameloft's in-house engine

Role: Game Design (Gameplay, Interaction, Activities)

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Explore and play with friends!

LEGO® Star Wars™: Castaways is the first online social, action-adventure LEGO Star Wars game on Apple Arcade where players can build and customize their own in-game LEGO minifigure, team up with friends and explore Star Wars locations to uncover and solve mysteries.

GAME OFFICIAL SITE

My Work

Joining the studio in the middle of pre-production on this project, I filled a variety of design roles. Most notable was owning the gameplay design of the vehicle game mode, a secondary gameplay mode in which the player could embark on action-oriented single-player space battles. These levels would play out on-rails (in the style of early 3D space shooters, like Star Fox) along a semi-randomized track through familiar Star Wars environments. Players would need to balance evasion with aiming, as well as their chosen vehicle’s handling and abilities, to destroy as many enemies and targets as possible before the end of a level.

Vehicle Gameplay Design

The first challenge in designing the vehicle gameplay was in fitting its dramatically different gameplay, controls, and perspective in with the rest of the game. Our intended audience included fairly young children with very little games fluency, so the goal was to make it very straightforward to play and keep it close to the gentler pacing of the on-foot levels.

Movement & Aim-Assist – Movement and aiming were all tied together, so that the player would only need to use one stick and 1-2 buttons, keeping it accessible across the different platforms we designed for. Generous aim-assist ensured players could always hit the targets they intended to, so that they could focus on balancing aiming and evading.

Enemy Timing & Visibility – Levels were designed to have clear periods of downtime, evasion, enemies to attack, and databits to collect (the game’s currency). This allowed us to use very clear UI to indicate enemy attack patterns along the path, to elimenate the guesswork of avoiding projectiles in 3D space.

Multi-platform Controls

The movement controls for this mode turned out to be challenging in unexpected ways, and I believe the balance we managed to strike is one of the more interesting design problems I solved on the project. The movement controls on a standard joystick were familiar and straightforward to design, but when it came to touch-screen controls, players were divided into two camps:

Some wanted to use a virtual joystick in the same way as the on-foot movement controls

Some expected to swipe the screen to move the ship around, or even have the ship follow the touch input

Even among the dev team, feedback continued to pull the vehicle controls in both directions. We considered at first a toggle in the options, but the goal was to make it more intuitive to all players, without extra digging into the options menu. So I set out to design a hybrid between these two control schemes, that would work equivalently for a player with either set of expectations.

The hybrid had a virtual joystick like the rest of the game, but the ship’s movement would also respond to swipes across the screen, and the joystick would follow. After creating a separate prototype to test the feel of the hybrid controls idea, I worked closely with the gameplay programmer to tune it so that no matter which kind of expectations the player went in with, the controls would respond roughly how they expected.

It was largely successful in the end. Once the hybrid controls were implemented and tuned, players seemed much more able to simply pick up and play the way they expected. Some technical issues around different screen-sizes and control methods made things more complicated, but

Depth vs. Simplicity

The vehicle mode’s content was always limited, being a secondary game mode, but we still created a variety of playable ships and systems to bring some depth to the vehicle gameplay.

Playable Vehicles – With an approved set of Star Wars ships to have as unlockable ships for the players, balancing simplicity and depth was key. Only minor differences in the ships’ handling would fit the level design metrics, but in combination with a somewhat vague stats display in the ship selection menu to set player expectations, we managed to make the ships feel different while avoiding any balance issues later in development.

Scoring System – Though only a simplified version of this system made it past dev time constraints, it’s still designed to encourage some level of mastery of the controls and levels. Still, trying to finish the level with no missed enemies or targets for the highest score without dying, helped to emphasize the core challenge of this type of gameplay – balancing the need to evade damage with the need to aim at moving targets.