top of page

Assassins Creed: Freerunners

Game Designer.
Ubisoft Vietnam, Team size:7
November 2020 - February 2021.

Genre: Hypercasual, Multiplayer, Platformer, Arcade

Platform: Mobile (primary), Tablet, PC.

Assassin's Creed: Freerunners is a competitive side-scrolling autorunning platformer in the Ubisoft Nano catalogue for instant party games. Appoint your most trusted Assassin and enter the Animus with 7 other players, surpass the dangers and get to the extraction point first!Climb on roofs, jump on walls, use the environment and take an epic leap of faith to increase your synchronization and summon legendary characters from the entire Assassin's Creed series.

Responsibilities:
ACF game link

  • Lead & managed all aspects of game & level design from conception to release, including balancing updates (live-ops).

  • Created, defended and maintained all design documents through multiple iterations.

  • Helped analyze the Tableau data for balancing/polishing updates together with the game economy designer.

  • Worked with the brand guidelines in design constraints to ensure an experience compatible with AC brand.

ACF game QR link

Scan to play on Mobile

Achievements:

  • Created a pseudo-procedural level generation system within the small game size limit to ensure game replayability.

  • Highest revenue generation through partnership deals amongst Ubisoft nano catalogue.

  • Successfully casualized one of the most sensitive Ubisoft IPs with a brand GO and even getting a wiki page on AC wiki.

Challenges: Creating a Pseudo-Procedural Level Design system which offers replayability and fits into the size constraint .
ACF level design system 1

I wanted to have a handcrafted base for level design but also wanted a feel of randomness and unpredictability in the levels to keep the players engaged. The solution was to create small playable chunks of a level (prefabs) and combining these prefabs using our system to create different levels.

ACF level design system 2

Using a special prefabs, named "connectors" to bridge the gap between two gameplay prefabs worked to provide a seamless link between prefabs and also to serves as a breathing space between high pace platforming.

​

Next step was just combining the prefabs based on specified parameters to generate levels:

- Obstacles used

- Difficulty rating

- Prefab height 

Finally, based on average player skill (a factor of their positioning in last game, starting from 1), we generated levels average difficulty. For the length of the level we kept 3-4 gameplay prefabs per gameplay run.

ACF level generation prefabs example
Challenges: Level Design Philosophy

Each prefab needed to have a distinct identity. To make it easier I sub-divided them as follows:

1. Deadly: Areas with close (yet relatively safe) encounters with death. Close brush-off with spiky terrains, long jumps and falls

ACF level design prefab example 1

2. Acrobatic: Areas with a lot of air-time. Give player a good time to perform perfect jumps and breathing space.

ACF level design prefab example 2
ACF level design prefab example 3

3. Vertical: Areas with long vertical climbs. Scenarios with chained wall-jumps and vertical hook-swings. Need to smartly utilize the turn-back of character.

4. Divergent: Areas which bi-furcate into multiple pathways, often governed by harder to reach path = faster path. The starting and end point remain the same.

ACF level design prefab example 4

5. Special: Areas that have elements that stack up for different impactful outcomes.

Example: Rubberbanding areas using Collapse bridge, Near (safe) death escape (hookswing between a wall of swings).

6. Fillers: Areas with no specific purpose and easy to traverse to add more breathable moments for players. Also includes any miscellaneous areas that do not fit in above categories.

ACF level design prefab example 5
Challenges: How to make single tap platforming fun?
ACF how to play infographic
ACF QR link

The player has only one input, jump, performed by either tapping the screen on touch enabled devices such as smartphones and tablets or pressing the space button on computers. The character must be navigated through obstacles that are interacted with automatically, such as awnings that serve as bounce pads, crumbling floors that give way after being stepped on, ropes that can be climbed and grappling points that have the characters enter a swinging arc.

Characters can double jump and wall jump and jump off the swinging off the grappling points, with perfectly timed jumps off these giving the character boosts of speed that will enable them to overtake other characters.

​

Perfect timing in jumps adds a skill factor while respecting the casual feel and simple controls (one finger gameplay).

​

All of these aspects were distributed as stats for the character roster as well.

bottom of page