How ‘ Fall Guys’ became 2020 hit
Megan Ralph, the mind behind the Egg Scramble, takes us through the design.
Critic Todd Martens examines how the game’s wackiest level was designed and why it’s so addictive.
“Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout” is the best sort of video game chaos.
Its style is as inviting and as brightly lavish as a candy table at a banquet, and its bite- size, mini- game philosophy makes it difficult to stop after a single round. The charm of its addictive ability to merge competition with approachability has made “Fall Guys” the unexpected multiplayer breakout game of 2020: More than 10 million copies on PC have sold since its August release and it’s the most downloaded game ever on the PlayStation Plus subscription service.
The titular Fall Guys — jelly bean- meets- Teletubby-meets- Care Bear- like figures — will wobble, hobble and fall through bouncy obstacle courses inspired by over- thetop, cult- favorite game shows such as “Takeshi’s Castle.” While losing can frustrate, especially when your Fall Guy is close to the finish line of a bubble- gum- toned course filled with ramps, seesaws or breakaway doors and is suddenly batted away by a giant spinning hammer, the game still manages to possess a silly, innocent charm.
For the player, its objectives are recognizable on visuals alone — run here, avoid that, steal a tail. Victory goes to the last Fall Guy standing. But this requires surviving a series of courses — or games, each never lasting more than a couple of minutes — by racing to a finish, solving simple memory exercises or competing in zany team matches.
With more courses and game options landing Thursday, we called “Fall Guys” level designer Megan Ralph to chat about how a “Fall Guys” course is created. Ralph walked us through a start- to-finish look at how the team arrived at one of her favorite levels, the Egg Scramble, a team- based contest in which each group tries to corral the most eggs.
The initial pitch
The development of new courses has evolved into a formal process that often includes full- team brainstorm sessions at the game’s London- based studio, Mediatonic. But when Ralph began working at Mediatonic in summer 2019, there were no such formalities. At the time, she says, the studio had just three courses fit for public showing at that year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.
“They didn’t have a pipeline,” Ralph says of those initial “Fall Guys” rounds. “They came together organically. That’s nice in theory, but we couldn’t go forward with an actual product without having a proper process. That’s what I was trying to establish.”
“Fall Guys” at that point also didn’t have team games, and creating one was an initial assignment given to Ralph. Like all “Fall Guys” courses, player objectives had to be readily clear, so Ralph came up with the core gameplay concept — “fetching and stealing.”
With the understanding that the geometry of the level
had “to be intuitive,” Ralph came up with the triangular vision for Egg Scramble. In the mini- game, there is a nest of eggs in the center of the course, and each team has to collect as many as possible, all while defending its own basket- like base and stealing from others. This design, slanted toward the center nest, allowed each team to have an equal amount of running space to the nest; also, should an egg be dropped on the way to a team’s base, it would gradually make its way back to the central nest.
“Fall Guys” didn’t have any props. While one course gave players tails and the ability to steal the tails of others, Ralph believed that creating some sort of prop — an egg, in this case — and asking the players to fish for them from a central point would make it easy to keep score. It also allowed her to create a mini- game where the player’s focus can constantly shift.
Does one focus on rounding up loose eggs? Stealing the eggs of other teams? Acting as a guard? “I really wanted to focus on switching gameplay midway through the round,” says Ralph.
“Everyone is taking eggs out of the central nest for the first half, but in the middle everyone runs out of eggs and they have to steal from other people,” she says. “I liked that switch.”
Cameras! Slopes!
Once Ralph feels she has a good handle on a level, she’ll write up a single- page pitch. The document will lay out the game mechanics, providing a coder with a sense of how the level will play out, and also include a list of needed art assets. This is shown to the teams in charge of various “Fall Guys” principles.
But even when Mediatonic opted to go ahead with Egg Scramble, there were many questions left to solve. In an early 3- D mock- up of the level, back when the game had 100 Fall Guys rather than 60, the gray area in the center was left open because it was unclear where the camera would be placed. Preliminary iterations had cameras that would remain stationary with the nest of the player’s team centered, as opposed to the roaming, f loating ones that are in the final product. Some of the thinking was that the player could be hyper- focused on
the end goal. A team’s nest would be straight ahead, and competing nests would be tucked in the corner of the screen.
One discarded idea was that an egg would disappear when dropped and essentially respawn in the center of the map. Anyone who has played “Fall Guys” knows that dropping an egg isn’t an “if ” but an inevitability, and there’s a delicate balance between challenging and downright frustrating the player.
Other problems came to the fore in trying to simplify the design process. One solution that became clear: the free- roaming camera.
It also changed the whole game: “If we wanted to encourage stealing or a shift in gameplay, we had to do something about this, as the fixed camera is focused on [ protecting] your base,” Ralph says.
Tokyo at night?
One of the most electric photos Ralph revealed was one that deviates from the current “Fall Guys” style. It shows how the level would have been transformed into a part rave, part neon-drenched cityscape with a vibrant, upbeat electronic score courtesy of Daniel Hagström and Jukio Kallio.
Ralph says the inspiration was Tokyo at night. Yes, “Fall Guys” originally had day- night cycles, which would have changed the look of some of the courses.
The night cycles were dropped because they added unnecessary complexity for the developers and players. Lighting became trickier to manage, and the shifting day- night courses, especially the club- inspired nighttime ones, threw too many distractions at the player.
“We wanted those Tokyo neon lights, and a dramatic EDM feeling,” Ralph says. “In the end, we decided to make everything cohesive and light it in a daytime environment. It was better. People were getting lost when we would change the lighting and the vibe of the levels so much.”
Another concept that was dropped: bunnies.
Since bunnies are associated with eggs, team nests were fashioned into bunny mouths; teeth became digital scoreboards.
“It’s so cute,” Ralph says. “It’s just a shame we couldn’t get it working.”
About those eggs
Some things in “Fall Guys” are random. When a breakaway door in a course is busted through, those foamlike constructions go bouncing every which way. The eggs, however, required more specificity and control to make the level a success.
“We networked all those eggs, which means we put things on the eggs so the servers know where they are at all times,” says Ralph. “That was a nightmare. Every few months the tech team would come back and say, ‘ Can we reduce the egg number?’ I think we ended up with around 40 eggs, but we were very ambitious.”
Often more than one player attempts to grab an egg at the same time, meaning everything needs to be precise across multiple connections.
“If you drop an egg and someone else grabs it, that has be very accurate on people’s machines,” Ralph says. “So it’s constantly sending messages back and forth to the server. Otherwise, the eggs would look like they’re in different places on everyone’s screen, and that was very difficult.”
That was a key lesson. While the number of eggs was in flux until late in this level’s development, going forward, Ralph says, the tech team was brought into level design conversations earlier. “We had these discussions around the eggs a tiny bit late,” Ralph says.
Then there’s the color of the eggs. In the final game, they look like regular white eggs. But since “Fall Guys” is an explosion of pastel colors, the team initially thought the eggs should be as flamboyant and dramatic as the rest of the game. Bad idea.
“They clashed too much,” Ralph says. “Plus, some of those were team colors, like pink or blue. So they would get lost. ... We thought we could do different eggs for different teams and we had to rule that out. They weren’t readable, and there was too much visual noise if you tried to create individual eggs.”
The bonus of making the eggs plain was that the rare “golden” eggs, which are worth more, stand out.
The finished level may lack Tokyo- inspired neon, yet it still feels incredibly vivid. Eggs bounce and roll everywhere, Fall Guys grab anything and everyone, and spinner hammers complicate things. Plus, getting in and out of a nest while trying to steal an egg is no easy feat.
“It was sort of the first 3- D game that the company had worked on,” Ralph says, “and there was a very long muddled process of feedback.”
A level design and early test could usually get up and running within two or three weeks, sometimes longer for the complicated race arenas.
The key, says Ralph, is to keep moving forward even while designs are being worked out.
“I’ve always found if you don’t keep that tight, and keep a record of changes, and get people to justify why you want things changed,” she says, “you go around in circles.”
Anther reason to keep detailed records: Today’s rejected idea could be tomorrow’s centerpiece. So there’s hope for bunnies. Why stop there? What about a pink cat? Or an aqua- blue frog?