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MAYANAGARI

Unity | Game DesignER | Hypernova Interactive

Free-to-play open-world mobile game, Mayanagari is a gangster game which is set in the streets of India, focusing on localising the experience.

Mayanagari is an open world action mobile game (akin to the GTA series) set in Mumbai, India. It tries to capture the dream like city with all its density, diversity, drugs, and deception. It is an enormous game being worked on by a relatively small team. Being a part of such a project meant that everyone had to play multiple roles and take ownership of many parts of the project.

We designers followed a process that involved all the stake holders while designing any system. This was an iterative process and gave everyone in the team a place to put in their thoughts and ideas. With the involvement of developers and artists, it also helped us in defining most of the technical and art requirements beforehand, reducing back and forth during the production stage.

Being a small studio, I also got to work on various disciplines apart from game design ranging from Level Design, Quest Design, Cinematic trailer video, to public play tests. Not to forget, all this work wouldn’t have been possible without the amazingly talented team at Hypernova Interactive.

Work

Destructible System

The destructible system defines the physics behavior of the in-world objects that are placed throughout the map. This made sure that we are able to visually populate different areas of the map while making it drivable by breaking and passing through these props.

The behaviors of destructible props are segregated according to their physical appearance such as weight, size, and the material they are made of. All the configurations also involve spawning of VFX and SFX. With all these parameters in hand, the system allows us to define specific destructible behavior for each individual object.

One of the major design considerations that was taken while designing the system was uninterrupted driving experience through multiple stacked props, but at the same time, having the satisfaction of hitting objects and making chaos. This also catered to the idea of causing destruction through bullets and explosions.

With the above consideration, we were also careful about how each object feels while encountered on-foot and justify their appearance. Instances where an object is big in size and appears heavy shouldn't be moved by just walking into it, and smaller objects like wooden benches that are relatively lighter will have friction but can be moved and brake easily.

Destructible system is made keeping in mind the limitations of a mobile device. Being one of the most demanding systems in the game, appropriate optimization measures were taken to ensure smooth performance.

Old footage demonstrating destruction with weapon

Old footage demonstrating destruction with vehicle

Traffic System

As the game world is based in India, we aimed at capturing the vibe of Indian roads and the driving style of the people. But at the same time, being a mobile game, we had to strike a balance between the real-life chaos of Indian streets and the player experience while driving in-game.

Traffic jam on crossroads is one of the most common visual on Indian streets that we wanted to have in Mayanagari. But that came with its own set of problems, one of which being untangling the traffic jam. To avoid major jams in the first place, we started with tuning the collision detection system. This helped in detecting the vehicle in front as well as any vehicle present on either side. If a vehicle is detected, the speed of the vehicle is either slowed down or it comes to a complete haul depending on the behavior of the detected vehicle.

Old footage demonstrating Collision detection

Another solution to control these traffic jams was to have them reverse the vehicle to unblock the vehicle blocked on another route. While all these solutions made traffic AI smarter, we got more controlled traffic jams which we intended.

Old footage demonstrating reverse to unblock traffic

We have a smart traffic AI system that allows us to set the speed of each type of vehicle individually as well as have different speed limits for different roads. The system also allows for dynamic behavior like slowing down if the vehicle in front is at a slower speed and if there is another lane available, it can change lanes to overtake.

Through this system, we did the setting up of logical traffic network throughout the map defining single lanes, double lanes and highways.

Traffic system is heavily connected to other game systems as well like NPC AI, player vehicle controller and the wanted system. Killing the NPC inside the vehicle, looting a traffic vehicle, switching cop vehicles from traffic behavior to aggression and going back to traffic after the chase is over, are some of the interlinks between the systems.

Level Design

Mayanagari being an open-world game, it required a substantial area to build upon. We, along with the developers came up with the size of the overall map that catered to the technical limitations yet, giving us enough room to be creative and make the world diverse.

The game world is the main element of any open-world game, and our main target was to make the player feel they are in India as soon as they enter the game. To achieve this, the entire studio came together, researching, pitching ideas and eventually creating the foundation of the map. It was mainly the concept art and 3D team afterwards, that we coordinated with throughout the development to make the world come alive.

We used ProBuilder to white box different areas of the map. Our target was to strike a good enough balance between on-foot exploration, combat and drivability, and white boxing helped us to get the base layer of the map with all these requirements in consideration.

India has rich history that can be seen in the variety of architectural designs throughout the country. Having a limited canvas to work with, we had a challenge to show this diversity in architecture as well the landscape to cater to the gameplay experience. The process involved multiple iterations as this was a collaborative effort between Level Design, Concept Art and 3D production teams, but with our talented artists and modelers, we have been able to get this diversity into Mayanagari.

Other aspect of the Level Design that I looked upon is the quest layouts. Being an action game, we had to keep a balance between a logical quest structure while giving a Bollywood style, over the top cinematic experience. Mainly working along with the Cinematic team, we drafted the quest areas catering to, but not limited to player positioning, cover points, enemy placements, redirection of the player, and cinematic set pieces.

Quest Design

Mayanagari is a story driven game and the progression of the game is dependent on the story missions. The narrative of the game was done by the cinematic team, and the designers mainly worked with them on setting up the quest structure. From deciding how the quest will be triggered, how it ends, to all the events in-between, everything is carefully curated to add to the player experience.

As Designers, we worked as a bridge between the Cinematic team, and the developers. Each quest has its own set of requirements, whether it be tech or art, catering to different use cases. whenever such requirements came up, we tried to come up with a general-purpose system that would address multiple use cases helping in optimization and removing any kind of redundancies.

Tuning and balancing the combat for each quest, therefore, tackling the difficulty scaling as the game progresses is another thing that we designers looked into. It involved deciding the configuration of different types of enemies (melee, pistol, rifle) per quest. Other parameters include enemy count and positions, damage, health, and alerting other enemies in the area whenever there is shooting, or the player is spotted.

The quest system that we build was designed to make a wide range of mission types. We have a task-based mission structure, and the system allowed us to define each task differently. A single mission can have a time trial, kill all enemies, reach a destination, complete a specific action or any other type of task that we can think of. Quest system also gave us majority of control over underlying game systems allowing us to create a curated experience for the players ranging from audio, spawning and de-spawning quest specific assets, Traffic, to wanted system.

Lastly, to cater the cinematic experience, we worked on various cutscenes to stich the story together. All our cutscenes were worked on by the Cinematic team and once all the animations, dialogues and sets are ready, we integrate it and set it up in Unity using Timeline. Thanks to our in-house Motion Capture setup and some really talented performers who helped us achieve really high quality cutscenes.

Optimization tools and pipeline

With my understanding and experience in 3D modeling, I helped the 3D production team come up with a set of rules to follow while creating different type of assets. Majority of these rules were related to polycount and colliders that were required to address the limitations of Unity.

I also explored variety of third-party tools that helped us in long run. We integrated some of those tools into our pipeline that made the development process more effective by reducing manual work. Majority of those tools are for optimizing textures, and 3D models giving the control to the designers and taking off the production load from the 3D team.

As our target platform for Mayanagari is mobile, the main focus of exploring these optimization tools and practices was to reduce the draw calls as much as possible, and in an effective way.

Unity Scripted Tools

Being a large-scale project, there were a lot of repetitive and tedious tasks. With the help of my fellow designer who is more technically inclined, we made multiple tools in Unity to speed up the workflows of designers as well as the artists.

Other Features

Apart from the main game systems that I overlooked, I collaborated in other systems as well, as most of them were interlinked. To name some, I worked on the wanted system, vehicle tuning, Combat Design, and NPC point of interest system(A way for AI characters to gather around and do activities).

With the help of our QA team and developers, we also regularly spent a lot of time fixing bugs and glitches. Even if the features themselves worked perfectly fine, they usually ended up breaking when interacting with each other.

Some of the other systems that I worked on are unannounced, therefore can't be talked about. 🤫

Cinematic Gameplay Trailer

Along with the artists and the Cinematic team, I worked on our first cinematic trailer that was used to reveal the production of our game to the public.

For this trailer, I made all the character using Character Creator, and retargeted the animations in Unreal Engine. Apart from character creation and animations, I also did the rigging and key-frame animation of the vehicles for different shots and eventually, did the composition, lighting and rendering of multiple shots from the trailer.

Public Playtesting

The team at Hypernova Interactive conducted quite a few public playtests to get some user feedback on the game as it was still in development.

Our responsibility was to let different people (gamers and non-gamers) play the game in front of us as we analysed their gameplay to see which parts of the game were confusing, too difficult, or too easy. We also noted points where the player was most engaged so that we can capitalize more on those gameplay elements.

Additionally, we took direct feedback from the players, after the playtests. These notes and feedback were used to improve the game further.

Tools Used