Skylanders: Imaginators released in October 2016 on the Nintendo Switch, WiiU, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.
I was the point person for the Sensei Elemental Realms in Skylanders: Imaginators. I designed seven of the Sensei Elemental Realms from concept to completion. I had full ownership of these levels and scripted all of the game mechanics featured in them. As the project progressed, I offered additional support on the other three Sensei Elemental Realms and helped to get them ready to ship.
After the initial release of Skylanders: Imaginators, I worked on the Cursed Tiki Temple expansion pack. I created the temple’s interior and scripted all of the mechanics and designed the puzzles found within (up to the boss fight in The Cursed Throne Room).
Sensei Undead Realm
The Sensei Undead Realm is probably my favorite of the Elemental Realms that I worked on for Skylanders: Imaginators. The Sensei Undead Realm started with the idea of bringing a level into Skylanders that felt as much like a level from Diablo as possible. I wanted to create a quasi-randomized level that was heavily combat focused and highly replayable.
The greatest challenge with this level was overcoming the technical limitations of our tool that made randomization difficult. The tool we were using for this project did not handle creating and removing large sections of art on the fly, so I had to work around that constraint by creating some elements that weren’t actually randomized at all, but might appear so to the player.
One of the most unusual things that I did on this level was to create floating eyeball enemies that were inspired by the Treasure Goblins in Diablo 3. There wasn’t enough bandwidth to have unique enemies created for the Sensei Elemental Realms, so if I wanted to get Treasure Goblins into this Diablo-inspired level, I had to find a means of creating them myself. Fortunately, I was able to scavenge an eyeball asset that had been used in another area of the game and I scripted up a lightweight version of an enemy system in order to support this critter. I was really proud that I was able to create pretty solid path finding for this guy even though I didn’t have direct access to any of the systems that normal enemies used.
In the end, it turned out pretty great, and it certainly does have that Diablo vibe to it.
Sensei Tech Realm
The Sensei Tech Realm was a really interesting level to work on. It started with the idea of creating a level that could reward an excessive amount of loot on repeat playthroughs. I also wanted to create a level mechanic that did not involve battling enemies and that was very different from the things one usually sees in a Skylanders game. So from there, I wound up making a pachinko (like) game that builds up to 27 different variations of a toy after you collect the toy pieces into giant vacuum tubes.
The biggest challenge when creating this level was keeping track of the toy production progress with the save data. The visual scripting language that we were using wasn’t really intended to access or modify things in the save data, so I had to work some interesting tricks into my scripts that most other levels never had to deal with to ensure that the player’s progress with toy construction was retained properly. This level also has the dubious honor of having the two largest and most complex visual scripts that I created for Skylanders: Imaginators.
I really like that this level wound up feeling very different than the average Skylanders level. It offers a unique change of pace from the normal gameplay and offers an experience that players had not yet seen in the franchise.
Sensei Magic Realm
The initial idea for the Sensei Magic Realm was to create a labyrinth for the player to explore. I wound up creating a key-and-gate mechanic with three different types of keys that would unlock three different types of doors (I say doors, but it actually ended up being doors, bridges, and poison gas traps).
The greatest challenge in creating this level was maintaining a balance between having the level feel like a labyrinth or a maze, but still keeping it accessible to our younger players. I wound up using a lot of subtle guidance in this level, including cameras that help point the player in the right direction, an enemy NPC that always stays just a few steps ahead of the player, and pathways that would funnel the player in the right direction.
Ultimately, the level met my goals very well. Most players will end up getting lost several times traveling through the level, but it only takes them a moment to look around and find a clue as to where they should be heading next. I feel that this level is one of the best examples of balancing a challenge for more experienced players without being punishing towards younger players who need a bit more guidance.
Sensei Life Realm
The Sensei Life Realm started off with the idea of revisiting Mildly Irritated Sheep – one of the challenge levels I made in Skylanders: Trap Team. The main level mechanic was inspired by Angry Birds, Warhammer: Snotling Fling, and the board game Crossbows and Catapults. I’m always a fan of using physics to knock things down, so it seemed like an obvious mechanic to bring back from a previous game. This time, I added a new spin where the player has to grow the cannons that launch the sheep with a seed planting mechanic.
The biggest challenge in this level was getting our new physics engine to play nice with the the way that the structures were built. Our physics engine was very sensitive to small changes in an object’s location, so stacking the building blocks of the structures on top of each other would often cause the structure to vibrate and shake itself apart before the player ever interacted with it. With the assistance of one of our Gameplay Engineers, Steven Hatcher, we were able to implement a solution and get the structures to be stable until the player took action to break them. We had to build the structures layer by layer, allowing the game to run for an extended period of time while the pieces settled into place and all physics interactions died away. Once that settled position was found, we were able to input the final resting place of each piece manually and then move on to the next layer of the structure and repeat the process.
I’m glad I had the opportunity to rebuild and improve upon Mildly Irritated Sheep. It’s always fun to blow things up in a video game, and I love to watch kids play the level over and over just to knock over the forts.
Sensei Fire Realm
The Sensei Fire Realm was the first level that I started working on for Skylanders: Imaginators. Initially, I set out to create a full-sized level, but as we discovered the needs of the game, it evolved into the first Sensei Elemental Realm. This level underwent the most numerous and most drastic changes of any of the levels I worked on.
The greatest challenge in the Sensei Fire Realm was creating the Freeze-Ray Gun. I had created similar tools to the Freeze-Ray Gun in Trap Team, but there was an existing system in place that handled most of the heavy lifting for me. When we changed to Vicarious Visions’ tool for Imaginators, they already had a “tool” system in place that did not really support what I was trying to do – they used it mostly for keys and bombs and there weren’t really a lot of options in place for customizing its functionality. I wound up having to build my own system to support a carried tool instead of using the existing one. It was a great opportunity to jump into the new tool with both feet and learn a lot of lessons about how VV did and did not implement their systems.
Sensei Light Realm
The Sensei Light Realm was a really fun level to work on. The main idea that the level started with was an exercise to recreate one of our classic Skylanders mechanics in our new tool in order to familiarize myself with how their scripting language worked. I recreated the rotating light puzzles that we’ve used in most of the previous Skylanders games and that eventually evolved into a level of its own.
This was one of the levels that I was able to write story and dialog for and have it make it into the shipped game. I was very excited to get the names of the NPCs into the shipped game – Lux and Lumiosa which are nods to one of my favorite movies of all time, Mad Max: Fury Road.
The biggest challenge working on this level was the fact that by the time we moved this level to alpha, the game’s NPC budget was already exhausted so I wasn’t going to be able to get a new character to lead the Skylanders through the level. At that point, I started suggesting alternative ideas for how we could handle the NPCs in this level and still have them be something unique. Eventually, I sold the story folks on the idea of having the NPCs be “the living embodiment of light” and I got the VFX team involved to create us a dancing light effect that we could use for our characters. It wound up working really well since we didn’t have any modeling, rigging, or animation to rely on and I was able to script all of their behavior myself.
Sensei Earth Realm
The Sensei Earth Realm was another level that was born from an exercise in recreating an old mechanic from previous Skylanders games. I recreated the mining pick and mining rock mechanics that were used heavily in Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure and Skylanders: Giants and from there, the Sensei Earth Realm was born. The main twist that I wanted to put on the mechanic from the old games was to greatly increase the number of mining rocks in an area and increase the number of reasons to actually use the mining pick.
The biggest challenge in this level was balancing performance with the great number of active assets that could be active on the screen at one time. I wound up having to craft a lot of little custom volumes that would enable and disable objects based on their location. Fortunately, we used fixed cameras in the Skylanders games, so it was relatively predictable what would be on screen at any given time.
Cursed Tiki Temple (Temple Interior)
Cursed Tiki Temple is one of two expansion levels that launched after Skylanders: Imaginators shipped.
Initially, we weren’t certain how many levels we were going to release as expansions, so each designer began working on mechanics and level ideas that could potentially be incorporated into an expansion. I started working on a haunted mansion style level that was very much inspired by Luigi’s Mansion, old Scooby-Doo cartoons, and the 1980s horror film Waxwork. When they finally decided that there would only be two expansion levels, they tasked each designer on the team to create 1/3 of one of the levels. I had initially been expecting that there would likely be more expansion levels and my haunted mansion level was already laid out and large enough to be an entire level. The biggest challenge for me on this level was simply pairing down what I had already setup in order to fit it into 1/3 of a level.
I did have a lot of fun working on this level. I really enjoyed creating the light-reveals-the-illusionary-blocks mechanic and it was very stimulating trying to create varied ways of applying the mechanic throughout the level. I think one of my favorite areas of the level has to be the 2D side-scrolling zone (29:32 in the video above). This area was designed to be an homage to Heat Man’s stage in Mega Man 2, although I certainly did tone down the difficulty of the puzzles because of our young target audience.
Ryan Steiner 