About the project:
The Social Grip: Llama Drama is a completely new version of the second-person perspective stealth game, The Social Grip. During the development, the game was created by a team of students in their last semester while at the same time writing their theses. At the end of production, the game was presented at the Gotland Game Conference 2024 where it won the Almedallen Library award and was nominated for best Art Direction.
After creating The Social Grip in 2023, we kept an eye open for opportunities to continue working on the project. We finally found this opportunity during the last semester of our education. For the purposes of our theses and new design ideas, we made The Social Grip: Llama Drama. Alongside the production of the game, the team split up into two different research teams for their respective research questions. This meant that aside from the overlap between the two, everyone had to split their time working on the project between their thesis work and project work. With a few changes in the composition of the team and new members joining us, the production team for this game grew from 7 to 9 team members.
During pre-production, we reevaluated and changed various design elements from the original game. These changes were mostly concentrated around the movement system and art style. The Social Grip's movement originally worked on a tile-based movement system. In a response to players' wishes for more control over their character, this was switched out for a point-and-click movement system. We made this change in response to a desire from players to have more control over the character's movement in the game. Between production of The Social Grip and Llama Drama, our art lead had also reevaluated the art direction of the game and refined it to a more cohesive and comprehensive art style.
The game presented at the Gotland Game Conference 2024 featured two levels. The first level functioned as an onboarding level for the game's returning camera switching mechanic. In the second level, we introduced a new mechanic that required the player to collect pieces of evidence to be able to complete the level.
My work on the project:
Since pitching the idea for The Social Grip to my teammates in 2023, I have split my time on the project between working as a product owner and a level designer. In addition, during The Social Grip: Llama Drama's development, together with one half of the production team, I spent a large chunk of my time working on the thesis subject we had chosen.
For the original Social Grip, I was the sole level designer for the project. For Llama Drama, we decided to bring more level designers onto the team. Because of this, we ended up working as a team of three level designers while working on the project. As the original level designer of the team, I worked together with the two new level designers and our quality assurance to develop four new levels for the game. Due to time constraints, we ended up choosing two of these levels for the final product. These two levels were the current level one, which functions as an onboarding level, and level two, which was our larger “test your skills” level.
Both levels that we had decided not to finish were the levels that I had been in charge of. Each level had its own reason for not being added to the game, but for both it came down to time constraints. We did not have the time to develop all the needed assets and additional mechanics to make these levels a well-connected addition to the other levels. My level design work hereafter focused on supporting the two other level designers in setting up the levels, prepping prefabs for use in the levels, and helping with camera placement.
In addition, to all of the above, our level design work also had a research purpose. All four of us, level designers and quality assurance, worked together during the development of the game on our shared thesis. Together we researched “How do fixed camera placement and landmark usage support a player's navigation and objective completion in video games?”. For this research, we focused on three of the levels during production to find the best methods to design levels so that players were able to keep track of their position and navigation while switching between cameras.
