Mario Chuman
Captain Underpants Skate
Description
Perform gravity defying tricks in this action packed skateboarding game from the world of Captain Underpants.
Play as iconic characters Harold and George to nail the half-pipe, beat up bad guys, pop balloons, and get a high score with the help of Captain Underpants.
Summary of Contributions
Initial Brief
Home Base was initially released as a Beta and its full release was decided to coincide with a major Dog Man content update. This decision made perfect sense as Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man is one of Scholastic’s biggest properties and our internal demos and pitches impressed our partners. Once the full release of Home Base came and went, the followup question was inevitable. If we can get Dog Man onto Home Base can we do the same for Captain Underpants?
When the ball started rolling for internal discussions, I was chosen to lead the design for the game from preproduction to deployment.
Design Philosophy
When deciding what direction to take the characters of Captain Underpants, our team decided to take a more holistic view of Home Base to see what we were missing. Our internal analytics showed that our audience responded positively to more action packed games and that those games were lighter on our portfolio. After our struggles to make a balanced easy to control racing game with both The Fast and the Furriest and Supa Racers, we felt it was a healthy challenge to get the gameplay style working.
The original design of Captain Underpants Skate was focused on a singular map with an emphasis on replayability and chasing high scores with tricks. By approaching the subject of a “racing game” at a different arcade structure instead of a level based system, we figured that it would provide a fresh experience while hitting out design goals.
Challenges and Iterations
Unfortunately, we ran into technical and design limitations with this concept so it was scrapped early. Our biggest goal was to have an easily understood control scheme, and conveying going backwards was proving to be too difficult for initial playtests. This along with providing compelling level design that would facilitate replaying it meant we had to readjust our design.
Our second incarnation of Captain Underpants Skate was a more traditional level system that graded you by the end of the level. This was more similar to our other racing games so it was a great fallback, but it still needed work. The quirks from the previous games remained with a timer system that punished players for being too slow, a “feel bad” failing grade if not enough tricks were accomplished, and overly harsh collisions that triggered failstates. The latter was going to be a technical hurdle to solve, as the design of the game wanted to incentivize players to perform tricks but if players kept faceplanting they would be incentivized to do the opposite and play it safe.
Our third iteration of the game had customizable tricks, half pipes, and a more forgiving collision system. Players would be incentivized to do tricks and occasionally levels would have enemies to automatically attack or collectibles to find. This latter design was initially minor but during play testing I discovered that the level that would consistently earn the highest marks would be the level where players were asked to pop a certain amount of balloons by the end of the level.
Realizing that this was a missing piece to guide players through levels with something that they were already vocalizing they enjoyed improved our internal playtest metrics to a level our team was aiming for.
Conclusion
While Captain Underpants Skate had many incarnations in its lifespan, I was very proud of my team and their ability to work with our stakeholders and developers in realizing our vision. The initial design goals were met: we made an easy to control and simple action focused game that reviewed well with our partners and players. The game currently stands as one of the most popular mini games on Home Base and stands on a niche that makes it unique.
