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Toaster Game
A top-down dungeon crawler shooter where the player controls a toaster fighting against other kitchen appliances.
PC
Spring 2020
I worked on Toaster Game as level designer. I developed enemies with behaviors that would compliment each other in ways that would create interesting and challenging room layouts.
While creating the enemies, I carefully considered our three main mechanics: moving, aiming, and shooting. These simple mechanics could quickly become boring if not properly utilized. I wanted every enemy to force heavy use of each one. Every enemy's behavior creates areas of denial for the player. This forces the player to always be on the move and paying attention to their surroundings. I was able to create enemies that work together to keep the player moving. The behaviors and movement patterns cause the player’s reticle to remain very active.
To ensure the player would engage with combat, I had to shift my focus to the level progression system. Originally, the plan was to have exit doors that would allow the player to enter the next room. This resulted in a system that encouraged players to ignore enemies and avoid combat. The system was changed to only allow the player to advance once they had destroyed all enemies in a current room. Once this system was implemented, players felt encouraged to engage. At this point in development, the game encouraged full use of every mechanic.
I also developed the difficulty progression system. The original plan was to have each room load in random order to ensure that the player would have a slightly different experience every time. But we wanted to feature a steady difficulty curve. I designed a system in which rooms were programmed with difficulty rankings that would determine whether or not the player could enter them. The first three rooms the player encountered would be ranked low. The next three would be ranked higher, and so on.
With the difficulty system in place, it was then my job to make level layouts for each difficulty rank. With this new version of the progression system, I was able to make sure that the player experienced a natural difficulty curve while still having room orders mostly randomized.
A unique challenge with this project was that we began it just as the pandemic hit. The team had to adapt to remote collaboration during this difficult time. But we were able to execute our plans, which resulted in a solid final product.
Team members:
Daniel Waleik: Level Designer
John Seymour: Producer
Jake Seide: Systems Designer
Jason Ehrlich: Programmer
Felix Abbot: Programmer
Stone Eaton: Artist
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