As said in the game page, DTTL is my final project made during my years at LISAA Game Paris. It was the end of the cursus assignment. With a team of 10 other students, we had 8 months to create a vertical slice of a game. Below, I'm going to discuss what my role was through this project.

Through that 8-month period, we went through all the steps a normal production would; during planning and pre-prod, we designed all the different systems and mechanics as a team. After the early phases of production, I worked mainly on the level design, balancing, and quality assurance of the game.

Level Design

At the start of pre-production, we picked a few unique sections of circuit we wanted to implement into the final product. As the main-level designer of the team, it was my job to work these sections into a well-paced and unique circuit. 

I worked with Inkscape and the use of vertexes to create a few circuits that implemented the same sections in different ways with different pacing. After selecting the final scheme of the circuit with the team, I started working on a more detailed version with elevation and a few elements to spice up the circuit.

First advanced draft of the circuit

When production started, our main programmer worked on creating tools that would help me design (i.e., a road creator from vertex and barrier creation) and create the circuit from scratch. 

Evolution of the circuit through development

As you can see, through development, a few changes were applied to the map, the removal of a few unnecessary features and the change of some parts of the circuit, mainly the shortcut and simplification of certain parts (the helix double road and final straight). Still, the idea and spirit of the map didn't change much; we just adapted to better fit the scope and feel of the project.

Final detailed circuit

Final map art

- Courtesy of Léa Sandeau

I had the luck of working closely with the art team and help them with the level dressing, placing the different 3d element and helping the map come to life in its final form.

Short video of the level

- Again courtesy of Joseph Legorre

Quality Assurance

Since I was assigned the level in git, I was in the best position to test the different element added through the project all-the-while testing my own work on the level by testing for road and barrier collision bugs.

Balancing 

In addition to being QA and LD, I worked on Balancing the different vehicles and overall feeling of the game.

During pre production, we created an excel sheet that would be used all throughout development. This excel got all the different statistics linked to the car and what they do, from turn radius to top speed and Nitro consumption.

At the start of production, I created a witness car that would serve as a basis for all the other car and would dictate the feel and play style of the game, when creating this car the goal was having a vehivcle that was easy and felt good to control. Couple to that vehicle I defined the impact of each statistic on perfomance.

DTTL Balancing Google Sheet

Creating the witness car and statistic weight functioned as a framework for balancing the other vehicles, after that I started working on different cars that would play with the different statistics and play style possible within the system of the game. Each time talking with the team on which car would fit the game the best.

Once we choose the 4/5 different car that would be in the final game, I began balancing them with a fun first balance vision. Where feeling the difference between them would be more important than being perfectly balanced, giving players a way to better express their favourite play style.