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Frits de Laat
Level designer
About Wildcard Casino
Welcome to the Wildcard Casino! Obtain tokens and increase your score while moving through the casino by forcing machines to pay out and calming down rowdy patrons, all while your weapon gets changed up every few seconds! Don't die, have fun, and most importantly, don't lose your cash!
Game jam
This game was created during GMTK Game Jam 2022 within 48 hours with 8 people. The theme was roll of the dice.
Rankings
For the game jam rankings, we ranked #119 overall, #101 for enjoyment and #23 for presentation out of #6165.
Check it out here!
Concepting
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The game jam's theming was: Roll of the dice.
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We started the jam by coming up for ideas relating to the theme.
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We quickly aligned to one concept and started working out the idea.
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We set up a planning for what we would need for our core concept working and divided the work, giving us a lot of time to work on the game.
Level design
Since the games' concept came quite close to what I already did regarding Cabinet of Curiosities, I took a similar approach to level design. I created a simple level design blockout kit and started prototyping level ideas on a grid. This time however, I was not forced to keep to the grid, so after blocking out the levels, I started moving and rotating assets to create better flow, a more natural looking environment and visual clarity.
Level design kit made with BSP
Rooms were based on real life casino references and were mainly aimed at creating interesting spaces with good flow, making sure the player would never get cornered or stuck. Iteration throughout the rooms consisted of making the spaces less rigid and adding more gameplay elements.
Lighting
I did all the implementation of the lighting within the game, with guidance from two of our artists, Olivier and Vassil, on color scheming and light placement. The goal was to really create that casino feeling, while also retaining visual clarity. I also used lights to highlight exit doors or important items and interactables within the levels.
Set dressing
I did all the set dressing for the levels, decorating the bars and tables, and adding in plants, carpets, pillars etc. throughout the level to make it more visually interesting, selling that casino feeling.
Level design ingredients
Slotmachine
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The slot machines were created as interactables with either positive or neutral player interactions.
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It has three possible outcomes when hit: It drops a health pickup, a luck pickup, or explodes.
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I created the logic for the health and luck pickup, creating the spawning and drop animation.
Chairs & Bar stools
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While playing around in the game, we decided it would be fun to give the chairs and bar stool physics, to add on to the chaos.
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Making the chairs non static also made sure that players could not get stuck on them.
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I created a blueprint which let you easily switch between chair or stool, making it easier to place them in the levels.
Quality assurance
For QA I mostly did a lot of fixing within the levels, specifically collision testing. My main point of focus was ensuring smooth player traversal and not obstructing the AI behaviour. This meant that I had to disable nav mesh collision for the chairs and create custom collisions for smoother player movement and no AI pathing obstruction.
Enemy spawners
One of the things I regret most from Cabinet of Curiosities was not having enough time to properly look at enemy spawn and wave systems. This time around, I took some time with Dion, one of our programmers to come up with and create a spawn system. To add to the theming of randomness in our game, I came up with a couple of systems that would keep the game challenging but also more replayable.
Enemies would spawn in waves, at certain locations randomly chosen from the list of spawn locations. After the first wave is killed, a next one spawns for the player to kill. I placed the spawn locations and made sure there were more locations than enemies spawning, to add to the replayability. I would then create 4-5 waves per room, of which 2 would be chosen when a player enters the room, adding even more to no room ever feeling the same. I designed the system and implemented it within the levels, while Dion created the logic behind it.
Frits de Laat
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