Summary
Toybox is a cooperative twin stick shooter, where both players must quickly kill player specific enemies in a difficult, fast paced experience, requiring the use of both bouncing bullets and special abilities. Toybox brings a familiar, nostalgic atmosphere, which provides a unique experience that brings out the child in every player.
Overview
Platform: PC with 2 Xbox 360 Controllers
Project Duration: August 2017 - May 2018
Project Role: Lead Producer, QA Lead, and Designer
I joined Toybox's development in January 2018 as the Lead Producer and a Systems Designer, in order to facilitate a transition in the growth of the team, and to add additional content in the forms of additonal enemies and interactible environment elements.
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Updated Market Research
From what I discovered, although many games encountered problems when it came to teaching the player – cute graphics can go hand in hand with exceedingly difficult games, so long as the player is properly taught. To that end, I coordinated with our level designer to make sure that our new game modes, enemies, and environmental hazards were introduced gradually. By scheduling how players see our content, we were able to keep a shallow learning curve that had a high skill ceiling.
When I came onto Toybox, there was a bit of a disconnect between the cute, childish visuals, and the fast paced speed running. We realized we had to give somewhere, so I did some research into other markets we could target. I learned about the casualized mid core audience, who are distinct in that they like low barrier to entry, but relatively high skill ceiling experiences. From there, I identified various competitors in terms of both visual style and gameplay.
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Enemy and Environment Hazards
While brainstorming enemies for Toybox, I wanted enemies whose behaviors were easy to learn, yet had flexibility in placement within Toybox levels. I also wanted to appeal to the nostalgia of the art style, so included some reference art in my summaries for the artists to view. I also made initial sketches of how these enemies would behave, while indicating what values should be exposed by the programming team for tweaking.
Similarly, I wanted simple, easy environment hazards and interactive environment pieces. The most successful was the crane. By adding a bit of verticality to Toybox, it allowed for the creation of more complicated puzzles by our level designer. These pieces of environment helped to fill the level with objects that had a tangible effect on gameplay in addition to just looking pretty!
Iteration Of the Candy Dispenser
I spent a lot of time tweaking, testing, and refining the Candy Dispenser over the course of the project. Here's a brief video summary!
DEVELOPERS
Ethan Loewald
Lead Designer, Product Owner
Charlie McGarey
Lead Programmer
Colton Orr
Lead 3D Artist
Bryce MacDonald
Lead Animation and VFX Artist
Michael Walker
Systems Designer, Producer
Matthew Rhine
Level Designer
Aaron Millet
Programmer
Rachelle Bish
3D Artist