School Project
Class: Design 4154: Intermediate Game Design II
Members Involved: Donald Neidecker-Gonzales (Myself), Jack Suraba (Programming, Level + Game Design), Toby Maguire (Programming), Mila Gajic (Art), Markly Reed McFarland (Art Assets)
My Role: Level Design
For this project our class split up into 3 different groups where everyone had differnt roles. Our group decided to work on a physics based platformer and for this project I handled the majority of the level design, including the paper maps, white boxes, adjusting levels after observing playtesting, and the final levels of level 1 and 2.
At the beginning of the project, our group made a trello board and a google sheet to divide and schedule the work. In the trello board we could also attach work that was eventually added to the game. We also color coded the schedule, with green meaning that we started something, yellow meaning in-progress and red meaning finished.
For the first milestone, as the level designer, I created two paper maps for level 1 and 2. In this first one I tried to make it quite simple in order to teach the player the base mechanics through a few points of death and lots of ramps to take advantage of the physics.
For this second paper map, I tried to create more ways the player could die and take advantage of what they learned from the previous level.
A few weeks later the first alpha was due which included the white boxes for the game where I placed all the enemies and the intial platforms to skate across.
After the alpha was completed there was also a round of playtesting where we got to have our classmates, outside our group, try the game out. To prepare for this, I printed out the white maps to mark down specific areas to improve. What I learned was that I had to tone down the difficulty and also create moments of fast paced platforming before going back to areas where more precision is required, which allowed for satisfying moments after players completed more difficult challenges.
After about two weeks of work, our group completed the beta. For my part I adjusted the levels, adjusting the difficulty and adding more intricate parts for areas where I wanted the player to explore more. In addition, our group also experiemented with the camera persepctive by making it more zoomed in. This ultimately was cut as it made it harder to navigate levels and see enemies.
Again our class playtested our game, and again I brought more paper maps for me and my teammates to mark down. The biggest thing I noticed was that when I introduced additional challenges, that broke up the pacing of the level, so I learned I had to make these challenges optional for players that did not want this added difficulty in their playthrough.
In the final gold version, I again tried to make certain points of levels easier. Additionally, I helped come up with the idea of coins and collectibles to help incentivize players to explore these more challenging areas. Collectibles importance were further emphasized at the end of the level where players could see how many they had gotten and which ones they had missed, encouraging replayability.
