Level Design
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I have for some time now been working on a level design document for the shoot em up game that my team and I have picked for this project. As I do not myself have any real knowledge about coding something like this or how to make a good level or a good level design document at all. I started by just thinking about how other games start a level and how they introduce different types of enemies and power-ups in their game. I also tried to find and read about it as much as possible so that I could get a grip on this. I started to try getting something down on paper that could represent the level, enemies, PC avatar and power-up as when I started some of these things was not in the game so far. When it comes to the level design I have been doing so far for the game I have been trying to design a level that will help the player learn how the enemies work before throwing to many of the at the same time. To begin with I decided that is was probably a good idea to have the player be by them self on the screen so that they can feel the movement of the character first. After this the enemies start to spawn. Not that many at first. One from the left side of the screen and two from the right side. As I have been reading and what I have gotten from that is to add some reward for the player as the action starts to top out. If this is a good way of doing a level design document I really do not know but representing this before we had all our assets in the game. I found that representing everything with just simple pictures and text was the easiest and fastest way of doing this.  |
Using this I tried so both show and explain what I was doing with level design to my team.
This is so that the player can learn that enemies can spawn at either side of the screen. After this there is a ramp up of enemy spawn so that the challenge for the player goes up for a while. Just as the action is on top the it is time to give a player a reward this comes in the form of a power-up. This just before we give the player a new enemy type to do battle with as well.