10 Week Project – Post 6 – Interior Decorating

As we are closing in on the final days of this project I, as the designer, have not had too much to design lately. So most of my time was supposed to be dedicated to playtesting, but since we bumped into some code-related problems, we needed to wait a bit with that.

So, what can I do while our lovely programmers are coding away?

Most of the feedback we received during the latest playtesting (a part from a few bugs) was that the level felt empty and maybe a bit too big. So how can we fix that?

I admit that there is a lot of empty space in some of the levels and this causes the player to do some uneventful traveling, which is not good. With empty spaces, we risk losing the player’s interest in the game and honestly, it looks really bad. To fix this, we have two ways to go.

We could either crop the levels to make the empty spaces as small as possible. By doing this, we would eliminate some of the uneventful areas and make the level feel more populated. The problem we face with this technique is that the outline of every level is already there in our editor. We have all the walls put together and the “key furniture” in place. By cropping the levels, we would ruin the position (coordinates) of all the objects and walls. This would mean that we would need to redo every. Single. Level.  And frankly, we do not have the time for that.

The other alternative is to try to fill the level with more objects (and maybe some more guards). This would make the uneventful spaces a bit more… eventful. The player would still be forced to do some traveling, but we would break up the pattern of “emptiness” if we add some more furniture (and by “some” I mean “a lot”).

Below are some mock-ups of the changes we could make to the hallway where you spawn and the first room you enter in level 2.

                                           Before                                                                                                   After

                                           Before                                                                                                   After 

The layout and size of the level is still the same, but will now have less empty spaces. So hopefully, you won’t get bored while sneaking around.

To further create a more dynamic feel of the levels, we could also add more guards. The levels in the game are designed to have certain difficulty levels. The first level is the easiest and the last is the hardest. This means that we need to be careful about add more guards since we don’t want to offset the balance of the difficulty levels.

Is there any other way to solve this problem that I overlooked? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.