Main Street Moguls
Project Name:
Main Street Moguls was my first project while working at Suit Up Games and I was the sole artist working on it through release, where the responsibility was passed onto another artist for live ops. This game is a simple tycoon where players own their own plot of land in a clean city in which they run multiple businesses such as a music store and food truck, and utilize UPS for their growing small business needs. The client wanted this game to "look and feel" like a Roblox game, but for a pre-teen audience.
Responsibilities:
Lead the Level Design and Art Pass for the entire map.
Art and Lighting passes.
Art Assets (Prop modeling, PBR Materials, 2D textures, optimization (triangle reduction, texture atlases, trim sheets, etc.)
Optimizing environments for mobile performance on devices as old as the iPhone 6.
Role: Level Designer, Environment Artist, 3D Art Generalist
Company: Suit Up Games, UPS
Level Design Challenge
The City
Due to the simplicity of the art style, the art in the game wasn't overly difficult to make. Most props tended to have little to no detail outside of some extremely simple PBR flare. As such, the difficulty in this project actually came from the logistics of the game design itself.
The city must accommodate 12 players alongside their own plots of land, which needed to hold a total of 6 businesses (3 launch and 3 post-launch).
Must have background buildings to not only bring the city to life, but to give players a variety of destinations for dog walking and delivery mini games.
Player Land Plots cannot be too close together due to confusion brought by all land plots looking the same.
Players should never be too far from a UPS Store.
There needs to be a central park with leaderboards.
As you can imagine, these requirements made for an...interesting time. Originally the game only had one UPS store, so it was impossible to layout the city in any way to make traveling to the UPS store mostly fair for all players. There were bound to be ones who were greatly disadvantaged in mission completion times based on their location. Players also faced a similar issue with dog walking and delivery minigames, where some would be sent across the city.
The solution was somewhat easy, yet somewhat difficult. I did my best to separate all player land plots by at least one street block of NPC or decoration buildings. In places where that wasn't possible due to attempts to reign in the map size, player plots were instead placed in a perpendicular fashion to avoid as much confusion as possible. The city was then zoned. Two additional UPS stores were added in strategic locations to make every store more or less equidistant based on travel time, and each store had 3-4 player plots in its district. Obviously some players still had advantages, but the idea is that even the most disadvantaged players would take no more than a minute of travel. Shortcuts such as stairs for the hilltop and seaside plots helped this greatly.
NPC destination buildings faced a similar issue, so the game was adjusted so that players would only be sent to buildings allocated to their zone. Each zone needed about 14 "doors," though not all zones had an even distribution of NPC buildings. As such, some buildings would have more doors than others, but not in any way that would make them appear unnatural.
Player land plots would be spawned in red-boxed areas when the server started.