Skylanders: Trap Team released in October 2014 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, WiiU, Wii, Android, and iOS.
I was the point person for the Villain Quest levels in Trap Team. I designed six of these levels from concept to completion. About half way through the project, the other designer working on the Villain Quest levels moved on to the animation team, so I took ownership of all 14 Villain Quest levels and reworked, revised, and polished them for release.
Chongo!
Chongo! was my favorite level to work on in Skylanders: Trap Team. The level started with the idea of creating a wacky game show that fit in the Skylanders universe. I wanted to create a level that had a scoring mechanic and that would reward prizes as the player completed challenges within the level.
There were a lot of challenges involved with bringing those ideas to fruition. Skylanders didn’t have many systems in place to handle all of the things that I wanted to do, so I wound up having to script a system that allowed enemies to drop loot, another system that could keep track of score, change phases at certain score thresholds, and award prizes based on the player’s score, and I had to craft cool power-ups that gave the player a really unique experience in this level. I really loved making the power-up items, especially the UFO – it was so satisfying to run around with the UFO and nuke all the enemies in the final round.
This level also presented a lot of challenges with performance throughout its development. It was really important to me to bring a certain level of chaos into this level. I wanted to keep lots of enemies on screen at all times and create piles of loot for the player to collect. Of course, having a lot of objects active at the same time made some of the older systems we were developing for unhappy. I had to work to get my scripts all running at peak performance and I also had to walk the tightrope of maintaining enough craziness on the screen to retain the level’s fun factor while keeping the frame rate of the level from dropping.
Overall, I am very pleased with how the level turned out. In my opinion, this level is one of the most fun and most unusual levels in Skylanders: Trap Team.
I’m With The Band
I’m With The Band actually went through a lot of changes before it became the level that shipped in Skylanders: Trap Team. The level started out with the idea of doing a classic “escort” quest – leading an NPC through hostile territory and protecting them from enemies as you go. There were a lot of ideas that came and went about who the player was going to be escorting and what reasons you needed to escort them. Eventually, I learned that there would not be enough room in the animation budget for me to get a unique NPC in this zone, so I went searching through a bunch of the old models that hadn’t been used in a Skylanders game for a while. That’s where I found the Gecko Chorus and the Capybara King who both had small roles in Skylanders: Giants, but hadn’t seen nearly as much screen time as they deserved.
The biggest challenge in creating this level came from the way that enemies are normally spawned into the environment in the Skylanders games. In a normal story level, each enemy encounter is custom built to give enemies areas that they can appear from that feel natural – doors that open to allow enemies out, ledges that enemies can climb up, obscured heights that enemies can drop down off of. In I’m with The Band, I was reusing existing level mesh to ease the demand on the art department, so none of those custom setups could be created for me. I had to get clever with how and where I spawned enemies and how I got them to navigate to their intended starting location. I created a small system that handled spawning in enemies in unusual locations, including off the edge of a cliff which would normally kill the enemy as soon as it spawned.
This level is a great example of how an idea can start out in one place and end up going in very strange directions. Even though the main idea of the level stayed consistent from start to end, I never would have guessed that I’d end up making a level about singing Geckos delivering their latest barbershop hit to their royal friend.
Mildly Irritated Sheep
Mildly Irritated Sheep started with the idea of bringing the gameplay found in Angry Birds, Warhammer: Snotling Fling, and the board game Crossbows and Catapults into the Skylanders universe.
This level was one of the most challenging that I worked on in Skylanders: Trap Team because there was really no ground work in Skylanders to build from. I had to create an entirely new gameplay mode and we didn’t have any systems in place to support it. I wound up having to script all of the gameplay mechanics and supporting systems myself and this level really forced me to drastically improve my scripting abilities. Fortunately, this was one of the first levels that I started working on for Skylanders: Trap Team and I was able to learn a lot from building it that certainly improved the later levels that I worked on.
In the end, the level worked out very well and I liked the unique feel of it enough that I revisited the idea later in Skylanders: Imaginators.
Gopher the Gold
With Gopher the Gold, I wanted to try and reverse normal Skylanders gameplay. Ordinarily in a Skylanders game, the player storms into enemy territory with their Skylander and battles their way through areas defended by bad guys. In Gopher the Gold, I wanted to setup a situation where the player would need to defend their space from invading enemies. In this level, bird enemies rush in and attempt to steal gophers and the player must defeat them before they get away.
There were a few significant challenges in creating Gopher the Gold. Foremost of these was the fact that the bird enemies did not have any sort of AI setup when I started working on the level. I had to script from scratch the behaviors that controlled these enemies. I’m quite proud of how solid I was able to get the birds’ logic. They weren’t the most complicated enemies in the game, but they were doing things that none of the other enemies did. I learned a lot about the enemy creation process while working on this level.
Mission: Demolition
Mission: Demolition actually started as my very first introduction to building a level for a Skylanders game. I wanted to start off with something that was relatively straight-forward and captured the Skylanders feel. The idea was to use some of the mechanics that had been seen in Skylanders before, but give them a new spin while I was at it. I decided to to work with the bomb mechanic and the key mechanic from the first two Skylanders games. I combined them into a new collectible explosive item that the player needs to pick up and place at defined locations.
The greatest challenge that I came across while making this level was establishing the proper enemy behaviors and patrols. Prior to this level, I hadn’t ever really worked with enemies beyond just plopping them down and letting them do whatever they wanted to do. In this level, I had to setup patrols and create alert patterns that would inform the enemies of the player’s presence at the correct times. Ordinarily, the enemy team handled all of these things in the story levels, but there wasn’t enough bandwidth for them to look at the Villain Quests, so I got to learn about the enemy systems and implement their behaviors myself.
Hatastrophe!
The idea behind Hatastrophe! was more-or-less born out of necessity. By the time that I started working on this level, the art team was already very busy making the main levels of the game look great. In order to ease the load on art, I started looking through old assets trying to think of something I could do that would not need any new art assets. One thing that the Skylanders games always had an abundance of was hats! So I decided that I would create a level that was based on someone creating counterfeit hats.
The biggest challenge when creating this level was adapting it to fit the Villain that wound up owning this level. For most of the development cycle on this level, it was unclear which Villain character the player would need to play in this level. I had to develop this level so that it would be flexible enough to fit the play style of any character. When the decision to give this level to Hood Sickle was finally made, he fit in quite nicely and I was very glad that I had built it so that it didn’t rely on any specific type of combat.
Ryan Steiner 