BGP (Scrap Pirates) – Week 4
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During this week the team mainly worked on polishing the game for the open playtesting session that was this Friday, but we also made an important decision regarding the project. The game production has been going well and we had a good base for the game to present this week, but we began to realize that our plans on creating more levels with unique graphics and environments were unrealistic. We have gotten a better sense of how long time it takes to create the different assets for the game during these past weeks, and in order to keep up the quality that we want the game to have, we have decided to focus on creating one polished level. This decision will not affect the level design negatively since we have worked mainly on the common area since the start of the project. There is a lot less pressure now though since we will not have to think about the design for the other levels, and we will be able to focus on quality instead of quantity. – – – I became ill during this week so I could not be as productive as I had hoped to, and could not be at the playtesting. For most of the week I continued working on the level design but I also helped out making a placeholder environmental hazard for the level since we had already implemented as much of the level design that we had planned to have for the playtesting, and the graphical artists were very busy. I also tried to design some puzzles, and thought that I would talk about one of them and some of my thoughts about it in this week’s post. This one has not been implemented into the game yet, so I do not know exactly how well it would work in-game, but I do know and have though about some of the problems that may occur. – Box Puzzle A group of inactive magnetic boxes (they will not affect the player or other boxes) are blocking the players’ path and they have to move them in order to proceed. However, there is not much room for the players to move around in and the boxes have mixed polarities which makes it difficult to pull or push several boxes at the same time. Pulling or pushing one box away may also cause another box to fall or move, which will change the puzzle situation and make it a bit more difficult or even easier.
That is the basic idea that I had for the puzzle. It is not a very advanced puzzle design and rather straightforward, but it has a few problems. We do want both players to be as active as possible in puzzle situations, and in the case above it is difficult for both players to help out solving it because of the narrow area they are in. They could take turns to pull the boxes out, but there is a risk that it would get tedious for them. So how can you make this puzzle a bit more 2-player friendly?
At the moment I have not settled for any of these solutions since it is something that needs to be experimented with in unity and playtested. The players’ game experience is really important and if something feels odd about the puzzle design or does not work out well it needs to be changed. – – – But that was all for me this week. As usual I will continue with the level design and puzzle design for the next week, but now I will focus a 100 % on the common area level and not think about the other levels that we had planned. Below is the current rough level plan that I am working on (bottom left corner is where the players start) with some ideas on how the level could be built up. The original file is very huge and would not fit on this blog so I shrunk the image a lot and the resolution did not turn out that great, but I thought it would be good to post a kind of “overview” image. (Many of the areas are also empty at the moment so there is not that much to see there.)
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