The Krilling

Screenshots

What I did

When I came onto the team, they were really struggling with where to go next. Their previous designer had left and they had to restart all the design work from scratch. They knew they wanted a game very similar to Untitled Goose Game, but didn’t know how to spin it or how to perfectly match it with their concept and the player’s goals. So it was my job to help them determine their game’s systems and how levels would play out.

Level Design Work

While I did not make any levels directly, I still had a big hand in determining how levels were going to be structured. Originally the game was going to be structured like Untitled Goose Game, with multiple areas that you would progress through after doing enough in each previous area. However, with no permanent level designer, the team found this concept too hard and for the time, scaled down to one area which they would flesh out. During this time they asked me to think of ideas about what the AI could be doing at specific locations and how the player would get what they wanted out of them (recipes). So I came up with some ideas, but some overlapped, so I just told them to pick between the ones that overlapped. But they liked a lot of the ideas, including some that overlapped with each other. So instead of having to scrap them (although a good chunk eventually did get scrapped due to an updated story), the team decided that instead of having one big area with everything going on at once, they would still have that one big area, but the focus point would be limited to a certain scenario per level and it would be your goal to cook a specific recipe.

System Design Work

Possesables

Before their previous designer left, The Krilling was about scaring people, however, after he left, the team felt the scaring mechanic wasn’t deep enough to make a whole game, and wanted to add different emotions to better fit the story and add depth. One problem, the new emotions didn’t work with the previous mechanics, so they needed a new gameplay loop designed.

So I did research and played through parts of Untitled Goose game, paying attention to what that game did. While doing so, I noticed that the players always had the ability to manipulate the AI, where they went, what they were doing, how they felt, etc. This was either done with your basic move set or by grabbing items that could do one of many things. While you are doing your antics, the AI will try to stop you, by forcing you to drop stuff and by fixing environmental changes they noticed. I sat down and thought of how to make this work in The Krilling without being a carbon copy and eventually, I got it.

In The Krilling you play as a ghost gathering emotions, that was something that was never going to change. So the goal was to make a system that could affect the AI’s movement, change their emotion to one of many, and be made in a way so that there was always more than one solution to the answer (another goal of the team). I realized that since you were a ghost, there was one thing you could do that would fulfill all of these, possessing items. These possesables would be the same as the objects in Untitled Goose game, affecting the AI, but unlike that game, they would also change the AI’s mood. For example, possessing a radio could make someone happy and draw them in, while dropping a ceiling fan would scare people and cause them to run away. This system allowed for everything the team needed, the AI could be manipulated by the player to go to a specific place and get enough of a specific emotion, but most importantly it allowed for multiple solutions in multiple ways. Not only could there be multiple solutions based on what possesables were available, for example needing enough happiness while there is more than one possesable that causes it (allowing the player to pick which to use), but also the system allowed the player to decide if they wanted to get enough emotion all in one big possesable use, or to slowly build it up by trickling the AI in one at a time.

AI Movement

Another part of the old design that needed a complete redo was the AI’s movement. Before it was a simple herding AI, where the AI would run from the player if they hit a button. With the new changes, this was obviously going to need to change. The main goal of the AI was for it to move naturally on its own, but at the same time still be easily manipulated by the player. There were also different types of AI laid out, Kids & Guest which would be the main target, and Staffers, which could still be affected, but would also attempt to hinder the player. While I would go into more detail, I think the document I made already does a great job, so feel free to take a look.

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