Heliwars was a casual indie helicopter flight game with a different variety of missions about fighting a group of terrorists. The game was designed to have many combat missions, but in fact, it is not solely about combat, and there are all other kinds of tasks included, that a helicopter could carry out. This way, we brought a different variety of playable helicopters into the game with different purposes (such as assault, transport, search and rescue, etc.) and made them customizable and upgradable in many possible ways.
The missions of the game are designed separately within four different categories, then placed into separate locations of a single map to create a level. The categories are: attacking a place/group of enemies, defending a place/group of allies, supportive missions (such as search and rescue, conveying ammunition, backup forces, etc.) and proceeding to a destination while surviving the enemy fire.
The game features stages, each one consisting of several levels. The levels within each stage have similar environments in terms of visuals (desert, beach, jungle, etc.), changing upon advancing to the next stage. There are also several helicopters with different functionalities and properties that the player can choose from.
My role in this project was to design missions and levels. Since I had worked on other flight games before, I had some experience to count on regarding the designing of levels. But since Heliwars was a freemium casual game, it was yet a different design experience, and everything needed to be aligned with the project's monetization strategies. So I also needed to consider that, while designing levels.
First, I created a list of all the possible missions for the game within each category mentioned above. Then I designed the levels, each one including a couple or more missions with a focus on enough variety so that the player had to use all different kinds of helicopters and upgrade them when needed, to be able to progress through the levels.
Here you can see the top-down layout for some of the levels:
I also wrote a short story for the beginning of the game and then developed it into chunks for being narrated between the different stages of the game. Since I was writing the story for a casual game, I tried to visualize the narration in my mind and think about how it could be implemented continuously, to keep everything simple and executable.
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