'It could have been vomit': The making of Level 22

Full disclosure: Back when I worked a traditional nine-to-five, there were more than a few occasions when I stole into work with what you might call a 'self induced headache'.

Talking to my peers, I soon discovered that this particular travail was something of a rite of passage - as workers around the globe will attest, I was most certainly not alone.

That's why, with its focus on those mournful mornings we've all suffered after the night before, Noego's Level 22 has been so adept at finding an audience for itself.

"As the story was based on a hangover, we even considered a 'vomit' feature at the center of the gameplay," notes Raphael Sautron, game designer and co-manager at Noego Games, "but it was definitely too much."

After working on "a classic platform game" for its first release, the team at Noego realised that it "missed a bit of silliness and eccentricity" along the way, and so it returned to the theme of a hangover-based game.

Just without the vomit.

The premise of Level 22 - which hit iOS and Android earlier in October - is unashamedly simple.

You play as Gary. Gary is hungover and late for work. Gary works on the 22nd floor of a building and needs to sneak his way past tattling employees and meddling managers in order to keep his splitting headache from turning into a pink slip.

Stealth-based games like this are hardly unique on the App Store, but there's no question that - unlike the subjects in play - they stand out when executed well.

"It would have been much easier for us to get lost in the crowd if we chose to make a running game or classic puzzle game," adds Sautron.

"We chose the stealth genre precisely because we could easily offer something fresh to players."

But for all the simplicity behind the themes, there's an amazing amount of work that went into Level 22's "hide and seek" style of gameplay.

"Our intention [for the artwork] was to evoke childishness. As the office work universe is well known for being serious, sad and cold, we had to boost it with lots of colours and make it funny to explore," he adds.

"We wanted it to look like a playground."

Strangely, Noego noted that its influences for Level 22 were decidedly more mature in nature than its whimsical artwork.

"The Metal Gear series is obviously the first source of inspiration," admits Sautron.

"We also tried to analyses what have been made in more recent games with stealth elements such as the Batman Arkham series or Hitman for example."

But due to the Level 22's touch-based interface, however, the analysis ultimately didn't help much and Sautron bemusedly notes that, "as a consequence, we had to figure out most of the design by ourselves."

No time for a lie down

From the beginning, Sautron's team was dedicated to making sure that Level 22 wouldn't be another by-the-numbers stealth title.

"The Noego team is composed of real gamers," confides Sautron. Even when we play on iPad, what we expect from the game is a minimum of depth and challenge."

Digging a bit deeper, Sautron confides he "didn't want [players] to forget about the game as soon as the phone's screen fades out."

"The main concern was to give depth in the game system for those who want to involve into it," he adds. "That's what we wanted to offer to more dedicated gamers."

With this more core group of mobile players in mind, it's little wonder that Sautron and Noego chose to a premium price over a free-to-play model.

"Right from the beginning we wanted to have a different approach than most App Store developers.

"The business model we chose reflects that vision. Offering something with a premium price was definitely a hint for customers. It tells them that our proposition stands apart from what can usually be found on these stores."

Yet curiously, there was a time when Noego considered a free-to-play approach for Level 22, but it quickly abandoned this model since it "didn't find a nice way to do it."

"I think that any business model can apply to any genre," Sautron says philosophically. "As long as you give value to what the player is experimenting, you can monetise it in a way or another."

Even with the monetisation model sorted, Level 22 ran into a few development problems that many mobile developers can relate to.

You got the power?

"We wanted to take advantage of the performance of the more recent devices but we also desired to allow less powerful phones or tablets to run the game without any slowdown," says Sautron.

Sneaking around this problem required a bit of finesse and skill, but above all else - it also required ingenuity.

"We optimised the way our assets were organized in our graphic atlas in order to load only what was absolutely necessary for the level to run. Then, we based the level design around that limitation."

With 2013 wrapping up and its first game launched, you'd think Level 22 would be coasting into the holidays - but that's far from what Sautron and his team have planned for the weeks ahead.

The first priority for the studio is the PC release of Level 22, and its "second objective is to release our next game for mobile devices before the end of the year."

When pressed on what this game might be, Sautron demonstrates a dodge worthy of a hungover Gary.

"We cannot tell too much about it for the moment but what we already know is that in every aspect, it's going to be completely different from what we already did," he concludes.

"We just can't do the same thing twice."