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Branches of level design

So the past few weeks i’ve been primarily focusing level designing the game. and it’s been a lot of testing and sketching level idea’s for the game. This process got me asking a few questions regarding level design and it’s different aspects of it. seeing as level design isn’t primarily placing really large boxes within a space without thought and design. Within level design you firstly have to communicate and enforce the fundamental rules of the game design.

So where am i getting at here?

Well i’ve been looking trough different games and their level design, There are loads of great games out there that all differs from each other fundamentally but all the games have challenges to throw at you, speaking about games like, Half-Life 2, Call of Duty, Journey, Candy Crush and Need for speed. So racing, adventure, story, multiply and puzzles.

Skärmklipp 2015-04-12 19.05.19

All of these types of games requires some sort of level design but the level design is quite different from the focus of the level design, we have (not limited to) narrative, puzzle or competitive level design. all of these focuses on different parts of what the level and what the level wants to convey.

So i’m wondering how the workflow and the design focus and tricks lay about for these different designs. Every game and every team may very well differ in how they choose to approach these diffrent approaches of level design.

Types of design

  • Narrative design

This level design have a primarily focus on advancing the story within the game and enforcing it trough its level design. A great example of a game that utilize and enforce its narrative is Journey.

  • Puzzle design

You gotta be smart to solve a puzzle, but i bet the one who creates the puzzle is a bit smarter. To create a puzzle requires a bit of understanding of the player and a know how on what the purpose of the puzzle is. at the same time the designer needs to ensure that said player is able to solve it and move on within the game.

  • Competitive Design

Multiplayer games that challenges the player against each other is in need of compelling and fair in order to deliver a experience where the player wont feel mistreated. Some games solve competitive design by using a mirror match up in order to not give any participant a unfair advantage.

For Clouds Below we aimed at a Narrative Level design with pieces of platform design. During the start of the game we wanted to introduces the player to its basic mechanics as (Moving, Jumping, Bursting)

level04

(Picture of the starting Zone)

Here we introduces the base mechanics. Where we at the same time reveal the world to the player. As mention earlier.

I look forward to disusing the subject further and to find out what approach works for all of the different types.

Until then.. Ta ta

Game Development Week 5, Graphical Work

Hello people.

This week I’ve taken a minor step back from the design part. I am still lead design but I’ve been focusing on the graphical parts. I’ve been taking care of environment and power up icons, Speed, energy and light power ups. Each power up increases the speed, energy or light. The Game is going to contain three of each type, making it possible to upgrade the character speed, light and energy three times. It exist one of each type in every stage trough the game. Making of the icons was quite simple. The task was about to create something that fits into the universe that the game is made into.

PowerUp_Energy PowerUp_Speed Sprite_powerup_light

I made the icons as a bubble holding the upgrade. The idea is that the bubble is going to pop the moment it’s colliding with the avatar. I am founding it to be a problem with the icons, to form it as something that belongs in the world.
The icon I am most dissatisfied with is the speed icon, it’s made to resemble an arrow that increase speed as well as I tried to make it resemble a simple fish fin. I think it’s a lot more detailed than the other two, I have slight concern that it either is going to stand out to much from the rest of the art work or that it’ll convey a different feeling from the rest of the upgradable.
I am concern if the bubble’s is holding the standard that the rest of the art is keeping, that it feels out of the picture. I hope that they hold enough standard to convey the message of what they do and that they need to be collided with to be activated.

I feel that I am finally starting to get to terms with the making of the game and the routine of being in the production.
The oncoming week I’m going to focus a lot more on graphical production and keeping the design in mind. Hope fully we’ll pass the Alpha that goes off tomorrow. The team has been doing a lot crunching the last couple of days. Today the whole team sat together and really worked on getting parts of the game up and running. Last thing before I left was that the fish can now eat and die of starvation.

That would be everything from me.
Adam
Over and out.

Game development week 4, Design Document writing.

During the week i have been writing the design document for the game i am working on. In the start of the week the design document was containing around 800 words and a lot of unneeded material. During most of my monday i spent reading trough the Design document and commented on what was in need of cleaning and rephrasing. Throughout the rest of the week i have been reading others design document from earlier project to understand the structure of the document, how they formulate each section and the general feel of the document.

the design document in its purest form is the team’s go to guide for how stuff will work in the game. For example
there is a section called States in the design document, the section explains every state in the game such as Start menu, game, options, pause, game over and winning state. Even if i think every state is really self explanatory they needed to be written down. All state still needs an explination of what they contain such as buttons that leads to other states. Not that i am not writing the code for the states, i am simply explaining how the states is going to work with each other.

GameStateAndModes
This picture explains the connection between each game state and modes. How the program can change between the different states and what state it can change to with the current active state. For example when the program is initialized you can either go in to the option mode to change settings or start the game; from Game state you can enter the pause state or you may activate the Game over/winning state, from both Pause state and Game Over/winning state you can enter start state again.

With the design document as a whole artifact i think my work could have been a lot more effective, to start writing the design document this week may have been a mistake. During the earlier weeks of production this document may have saved us a lot of time. in sens that everytime we discuss something and how it’s going to be, when that is decided it should be documented into the design document, that way whenever the production never needs to take the same decision twice. i’m as the designer is going to try and update the design document from now forward at least once a week. I believe that a updated design document is really healthy.

Over and Out Adam.
P.s there has been some problem with people unable to comment on the post. Hit me up with a private message or similar and i shall try to sort it out.