Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 5, Level Design

By: Simon Lundgren / March 13, 2015 /
Program: Programming
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Level Design? Who needs it in an endless runner? Well, it’s more vital than what you think. The week before the Beta and no level design proved pretty stupid. Let’s go through how It was solved.

Welcome to another design blog post for Magic Writer!

Until last week, we had no one working on level design. When I took the task of setting up the wavesystem (making the monster reset after each wave of monsters), I realized that I had no idea what I needed to implement for the wave changing system because I did not know how the difficulty would ramp. Now, this week we’ve been able to playtest some more, and the feedback went into the level design.

This blog’s artifact: Level Design of Magic Writer

The Design Document
In the design document the chapter about level design talks about four “knobs” which can be turned in order to change the difficulty of the game. These four things are the following:

  • Monster Health
  • Monster Speed
  • Monster Spawn Rate
  • Lenght of Words
(Looking at this now, powerups can also be used to change the difficulty. But since it was not considered when making the decisions it is left out for now.)
Monster Health
How quickly a player can defeat a monster depends on the monsters health. This is also relevant because item which crits deals 2 damage, making it more important to choose a fitting amount of health.

Playtesting showed that players did not like increase of health, since they expected to defeat a monster with a certain amount of damage.

Monster Speed
How quickly the monsters can move impact the chaos of the level. If the monsters move too quickly, the player gets stressed when writing items (which can be the intention).

Playtesting showed that the monsters moved too quickly, making it hard to even get past the first level.

Monster Spawn Rate
The spawn rate also effects the chaos level. How many monsters is on the screen at the same time impacts how much there is to keep in mind while playing. Since players have to consider what items has what property to be most effective.

This one is the hardest one to judge. We think the monsters are moving too fast, but that might be because the monsters are spawning too fast. This area is the one who needs more testing to find the right numbers since I think it might be the most important one too.

Lenght of Words
This was a problem we only noticed recently. New players had much trouble with words such as: Hippopotamus and chilipepper. They took the focus away from the strategic planning and weakness gameplay and challenged the player simply to spell the word correctly.

This was fixed by simply removing the hard words. Later we might implement a way to have new harder words come at later levels.

Summary
We had a problem since no one had done level design.
Playtesting showed that people did not want change in health, that the monsters were too fast, the spawn rate needed more testing, and that lenghty words made it hard to get into the game.

I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.

About Simon Lundgren

2014  Programming
Tags: 2014 , 5SD033