Headmaster: The Lost Lessons DLC

Headmaster is a VR game about escaping the Football Improvement Center, which is definitely not a prison, by heading soccer balls into targets to get high scores and complete challenges.I had a close relationship with Frame and they reached out to me to help out with building a new levels for their upcoming first level pack for Headmaster. This level pack would be called The Lost Lessons and would consist of the levels that Carl, the game world's challenge's creators, scrapped ideas.These ideas were deemed too dangerous, absurd, or expensive for the Football Improvement Center to approve of.

On my first 2 days of my 4 week contract, I played through Headmaster in its entirety and noted everything I could about the experience, including pacing details, what level gimmicks were underused, what levels were the most enjoyable. Something that really stuck out to me were that some props and gimmicks were only used 1 time throughout the campaign's 30 levels. I wanted to gives a couple of those mechanics another opportunity to shine.

My first goal once I got into the Unity build of the game was to get as familiar as I could with as many tools and assets as I could in my first week. I created a temporary level and started playing with the event system they had in place, getting targets to pop up when others were hit, getting drones holding targets to move following specific paths, how the ball launchers worked, and exploring a few unique game objects (including the forklift).

The layout of targets I ended up with with was actually very fun on this test level after my noodling. However, I wanted to spice it up. I decided that I would take advantage of the forklift object that was already in the game but only utilized once in a very early level. I wanted my level to have an abundance of them, and have them raise and dynamically alter the way the targets are laid out in a fun way. My original plan was to have forklifts lifting other forklifts, creating more and more extravagant structures and patterns to hit. However, I quickly found that raising target up as high as 2 forklifts required too much force from the player that could cause injury. I decided to scale my vision back some and include 3 separate forklifts.

Each of these 3 forklifts had their own target set associated with them. For example, when hitting a target on the right side of the net will raise 2 targets to the right of the net, hitting those targets will raise more targets, those raise the forklift, and so on. Completing one of these target sets is difficult and demands the player to be not only accurate, but be careful about when they go for certain targets, as there are 2  rewards the player by having opportunities for huge point targets and power-ups. Using moving drones with high value targets in conjunction with the forklifts helped to draw the players attention and focus on the forklifts. These target paths were differentiated further by including 2 ball launchers from opposite sides of the goal. These launchers make it easier to hit the ball to the target set nearest to them, offer the opportunity to hit the targets on the middle set, and and extra challenge if the player wants to go for targets on the opposite side's set.

This level accomplished much more than what I wanted it to when I began making it as a test level. I gained a much deeper understanding on how I could go forward and create more levels with Headmaster's tools, it stands as a memorable level with its theme, and use a lot of forklifts.

Another level theme from the main Headmaster campaign that I thought was grossly underused was the darkness and the head lamp only seen in, yet again, one level. So, I set out to make the second level using this dark theme. I decided to double down on the underused objects in this level and borrow ideas from one of the game's party mode levels; glowing targets, and glowing balls. These glowing objects were never used in a pitch black room and I thought I was a no brainer combination.

My first major obstacle in making this level was actually making the level dark! As this was only a feature of one level I had to study that other level. Copying all the lighting data over was easy enough, but I liked the beginning scene of all of the lights breaking causing the room to be dark. Turns out, that sequence had a lot of code that would only work in that one level without modification. After a lot of tinkering, I created a version of the script that could be placed in any level with any light sources. This was exactly what I needed for the intro. The next step was to get the head lamp working. In the other level that it was used in you were immediately given the light. I wanted the player to have to earn the light by hitting a specific target in the dark, once you have the headlamp you will be able to look around the environment and reveal more targets that were there the whole time. Again, I had to decouple a piece of code from the original level to get the headlamp to shoot out of the ball launcher, as if it were a ball which it was not considered to be before, at the right time when the special target was hit.

Note: The headlamp actually had a bug that had been in Headmaster since release but never noticed until testing in my level. When the headlamp was equipped it altered the trajectory of any ball that was hit. In the previous level it was not noticeable because you started with it equipped, in my level you got it midway through the level and would mess with the flow you got going initially. The difference was very subtle but the team was able to pin-point the issue and patch that away.

The layout and sequencing of targets in this level was the next thing on the chopping block. The seldom used glowing targets had 3 separate color and indicated the target set each of the targets were associated with in their original level. I liked the idea of using all of these colors to symbolize something in the level. I decided to make those color represent what kind of target will appear when they are hit. For instance, when you hit a red target, score targets will pop up. When you hit a blue target, extra balls will pop-up. I made a few different iterations on this concept, but each time I had someone else test it they could not identify any significant meaning in the coloring of the targets.

I took this feedback from testing and re-tooled the level to only include two of the different colored targets, red point targets and blue extra ball targets. The sequence of the targets were made more scattered throughout the level as I didn't feel like I had to keep the groupings of colors together. This made the level flow much more smoothly and tested the players ability to redirect in many different direction. I ensured that getting the headlamp at the end of the main target set felt like a major accomplishment by having lots of high value targets, and power-ups behind the goal.

I was very pleased with the final result of this level. It went through a lot of iteration and I think is much better for it.

My last week and a half at Frame was mostly set aside to do polishing work on my previous two levels to get them to hit frame rate on PS4 and tweak star totals, but I had a wicked idea. One of the other designers on the DLC, Sean Kennedy, was making a couple of levels featuring trampolines, an unused object in the Headmaster campaign. I was inspired to make my own, but with a twist. Where Sean created levels where the goal was to bounce the ball off the trampoline into targets and through hoops, I wanted to create a level where the player had to rebound the ball off the trampoline back at their head to hit targets.

The mechanic of just rebounding the ball off of a regular trampoline was very enjoyable, however, I found that there was too much variation and randomness involved for it to be the main mechanic of the level. I had to make a new version of the trampoline that would be more consistent. I knew that I had to remove the physics material from the trampoline that made the balls bounce. I ended up creating a new script to fire when the ball hit the trampoline that uses modified code from the ball launchers to modify the existing ball's velocity to fire it at and above the player's head. This change made a huge difference in how the mechanic of rebounding the ball back towards you felt. It never felt perfect due to time restraints, as the ball always felt slightly in above and in front of the player's head. With a time restraint, this imperfection would have to do and be designed around.

My next challenge was how I was to make hitting the trampoline required to get the 1 star score. My solution was to make the majority of target only appear for a brief time after the trampoline is hit. The player is able to hit the initial ball launch into the trampoline, targets come up, and user is able to get one shot off to a target or back onto trampoline, then the targets deactivate again. Hitting targets that appear from hitting the trampoline will cause targets that do not deactivate to pop up. There are 2 targets next to the trampoline that never deactivate as well, hitting these will pop-up extra ball targets for added choice and risk vs reward situations the player will have to think about.

The last real issue that I needed to address was how I could stop the player from just rebounding one ball onto the trampoline forever. The answer I found was simple enough, just let the ball launcher launch a 2nd ball at the player. With how the new rebounding trampoline works, it is totally impossible to juggle more than one or two balls at a time without another ball colliding and messing up the flow. I wish I had another week to polish and finish this level to potentially release the level before moving on. However, making this level was still very fun and I think very unique for Headmaster.