Cobot Putt Factory Postmortem

Cobot Putt Factory

Role: Game Designer, Level Designer

Team Size: 6

Project Duration: 10 weeks
(8 weeks for the initial release, 2 weeks for added content a year later)

Link to the app on the Google Play Store

Game Brief

Cobot Golf is a mobile putt-putt game initially created in 8 weeks during my time at Simcoach Games. It was created for our client to introduce the concept of Cobots, or collaborative robots. The initial launch was created in 2022, with a two-week refinement sprint added in 2023.

Responsibilities

Coming up with the core gameplay loop and learning goals for the project.
Assisted in scripting the initial prototypes.
Created mockups for the UI for the game for the artists to refine.
Worked alongside artists to create tilesets to use for our levels.
Generated levels for players to experience within the constraints of the project.
Playtested with players in our target audience to iterate on levels based on feedback.
Worked alongside our programmer to create design documentation for features and verify that mechanics were working properly.
Created all sound effects used in the game.
Composed both music tracks in the game.

Design Goals

Our client came to us in the hopes of creating some game that would gather interest in robotics for kids in her school program, specifically targeting Cobots. She already had a battle bot club at her school that primarily attracted boys, so she was hoping for a game that would reach beyond a primarily male audience. The game also needed to be created on a short budget.

After initial pitches, I did some investigating into Cobots and their usage in the real world. Cobots are mostly used to assist people in factory work, which was what led our initial game ideation to be some sort of factory sim. However, I came across a video of a pizza shop in Italy that is completely operated on the front-end by Cobots.

The unorthodox use of Cobots in this video made me think outside of the box when it comes to game genres. It would be easy to just make a factory game. Why not try something a little more unique?

We eventually landed on the putt-putt concept after deciding that making a small putt-putt game would be possible given the limited scope we had. Using Cobots in ways outside of what is taught in schools also creates an additional educational element of teaching students that technology may be used in unorthodox ways to solve problems. Our client liked the direction and additional learning goals pitched. After some initial prototyping and a visit to a local putt-putt place by our office, we were ready to create Cobot Putt Factory!

Level Design Goals

As seen in the footage in the video, Cobot Putt Factory is played in portrait mode on mobile devices. This means that all levels have a limited width to work with, given the bounds of the camera that the player can manipulate. Players also had access to two types of Cobots to place in the levels, so I had to ensure that the player had the time to learn the mechanics of using these Cobots to maximize their score. Thankfully, both Cobot types are controlled the same way, so learning the second Cobot was much easier after the first.

Our series of levels after our update sprint followed this path:

Introduce the camera controls and putting mechanics (level 1)
Introduce the Putter Cobot and allow players to practice their controls (levels 2 & 3)
Introduce the pipe environmental objects and their functionality (levels 4 & 5)
Create a challenge level testing these mechanics (level 6)
Introduce the Wedge Cobot and allow players to practice their controls (levels 7 & 8)
Create 10 additional levels that ramp up the challenge and allow players to use the Cobots in interesting ways

This flow was ultimately used after recognizing that players needed more time to practice some of the core controls and the pipes before being thrown into the challenge level (level 6 above). Adding a few easier practice levels after introducing the Wedge Cobot also ended up feeling like a better flow to allow players to master both arms' uses in the levels before throwing them some unorthodox challenges.

Lessons Learned

Overall, the project was a success! Being able to successfully develop a game with such a tight deadline was a great first challenge being the primary designer on a professional game project. With any project, there were still some mistakes from my end that could have been improved upon.

The first major one was the initial designs for the Cobot arms. In the game now, there are two separate arms: The Putter and Wedge. We initially had designs for three entirely different arms for players to use. We quickly pivoted away from those three upon recognizing that we would not be able to implement them within our deadlines. It also was apparent through playtests that the Putter arm essentially could cover a similar goal to most other arm types we have been thinking of. For example, we had the idea of an arm that would pick up the ball and move it to another location. There are specific ways in which that arm would be useful, but you could just also set a few Putter arms to move the ball to the same location.

We pivoted to making the second Wedge arm that only added a Z force to the ball on impact compared to the Putter. This allowed us to keep the exact programming interface for both arms, leading to less work and less information that the player needed to be able to play the game.

Both arms have the same interface:
- Arrows on the top left rotate the arm around its base.
- Arrows on the bottom left move the arm closer to and further from the base.
- Middle arrows flip the direction that the putter is facing.
- The meter with the plus and minus buttons adjusts the power of the ball.

While this did end up allowing us to complete the project on time, I would go even further. In hindsight, I would have stuck to just one Cobot arm type and would have created objects in the environment to launch the ball in the Z direction rather than create a second Cobot to do so. The Wedge arm makes the Putter arm almost obsolete given that once just has an additional direction added to the force. There are still niche scenarios in which players would use the Putter. However, I think the close-to redundancy makes it unnecessary.

The worst element of the wedge is how restrictive it makes creating levels once it was introduced in-game. Giving the player the power to move the ball vertically at any point in the level is quite powerful, and made level generation much more difficult. Giving me the power to hand-place locations in which the ball can be launched vertically would have made level generation much easier. In general, the overall lesson I learned was to nail down the minimal core of an experience before diving into adding a bunch of features. Less can be more often in games, and I hope to grow from this experience by keeping that motto in my brain for future projects!