Pango

Pango is a third-person skill-based platformer in which you play as Pango, an AI android pangolin that can roll around the temple-like environment where his objective is to learn about the old society. Roll through winding pathways and jump over crumbling pillars as you collect ancient relics and uncover the secrets of an unknown civilization.

About Pango

UI Design

Main menu Background
Controller layout screen
Coins functionality with respawning and going back to the main menu
Special pickup functionality with respawning and going back to the main menu

Pango is a project I worked on in my second year of university where I was responsible for the level design and UI design of the game.

Level Design

Concepting different level structures
Sketching gameplay scenarios
Blocking out levels
Playtesting internally and externally
Iterating playtested levels
Working together with the envrionment artists team to finalize levels

17 Developers

Unreal Engine 5.1

12 Weeks

Project responsibilities

Playstyles

Rolling

The rolling mode is the ''special'' character mode in Pango. By pressing the right trigger the player can transform its body into a ball and traverse through the level in a faster way.

With this mode the player takes more risks with the benefit of getting a higher time at the end of the game.

Walking

The walking mode is the ''normal'' character mode in Pango. It is what you can expect from your usual 3D platformer, a character that can jump and walk through the levels normally.

This mode is the ''safer'' mode for the game, platforming in walking mode will give the player an easier time compared to the rolling mode.

In Pango the player is able to use 2 different character states at all times, walking and rolling. Each state has their negative and positive effects throughout the game and they allow for the game to be played in different ways. The player is always able to roll so we had to work around that while making levels.

Making Development

The level that I worked on the most is the development level, I'm a big fan of cool-looking reveals in games, so I knew I wanted to do something like this in this level as well. I started with the concept of seeing a big tower in the distance with a struggling path towards it where the player has to choose where to go. As seen in the blockouts I used different player mechanics to help the player choose what path they want to take, the ground pound in the start was awkward so I iterated the path decision with one of our Level features, the bounce pad.

The part that I iterated the most was the tower itself, my idea was for the player to enter the tower, go out the tower to then go inside again with a different entrance. This was harder than I thought, the first image from inside the tower played very poorly and I decided to scale up the tower to more than twice the size. This was a good decision on my end, because I could put a lot more gameplay inside the tower. This way the tower feels like a satisfying landmark once the player enters it.

Lastly, one other important part of this level is the area that is connected to the tower after the player entered it. As seen in the images, first it was a tight platforming section, but for variety reasons I changed it to a faster rolling section, because the inside of the tower already had some platforming. Later on one of my fellow level designer changed it to more of a combination of the two.

Planning and Sketching

Planning the level was one of our most important things in pre-production, as seen in the images below we made a node map with an according difficulty graph to show the progression of the game. We wanted the game to use the 4-step Level Design, we did this by having 4 levels for each step. An introduction to teach the player the base features, a development where we are combining features, a twist where the features are used against the player, and finally a conclusion where everything comes to together. Our final plan was without any side paths because we had very little time for the making of this level.

With all features worked out and the character not finished yet I couldn't make any levels because our character controller wasn't finished yet, but sketching was something I was already able to do to gather some ideas for the level. Some of the sketches I made during this phase are shown here.

Testing

The quality of our levels was highly dependent on playtesting, that's why we made sure to do internal and external playtesting as much as we could. Knowing we only had around 2 or 3 weeks to make the levels, some levels were tested more than others. In the images below you can see how we used heatmaps to show where players walked or rolled, and where they struggled the most. For internal playtesting we had this nice document that went over all aspects that were important to test. When tested, the person who tested the level could then fill in if it was presentable, playable, functional, or still in prototype. We organized these internal playtests with the whole team to make sure everyone is aligned with knowing what the game is and to get best testing results.

UI

Our UI was having some game breaking issues, the coins didn't get reset when the player died, the coins reset when the player went to the next level, and the coins were not resetting when the player clicked "reset" in the pause menu. We also had special collectibles that needed the same fixes.

Since I've worked with UI in the past I decided to take up this task and make sure it all works in the game. I fixed it by adding a game instance to the project that would save all the coin values even if the player exits a level. Doing that was the easy part.

The hard part for me was making sure all the coins return when the player dies, but only the ones that were picked up after a checkpoint, those coins that return in the level also needed to be removed from the players UI. Doing this took some time and communication with the person who worked on the checkpoints, but eventually I was able to fix it all and I even had some time left to create a nice controller setup that I showed in the main menu.