Game design or Level design?

My main task this week has been to create levels/waves for our game Selfish. In larger companies this is specifically done by “level designers” and not the game designers. However, as we’re working in a smaller scale I decided that this task would fit me the best as I’m keeping the vision of the game and therefore I should be the one putting the Lego blocks together. I should however not be the one creating the actual Lego blocks.

There are many things that needs to be done in level creation. This is where game balance comes in. A time-consuming pain. Selfish has a lot of variables that will need balancing, I’m however starting at what I believe will be the corner stone of the balancing; enemy speed, and movement patterns.

My programmer had a great idea, to create a wave manager file where I could edit the variables and create waves without much previous coding experience. He created the Lego blocks and gave them to me. I’m not going to post a picture of the wave manager because, hundreds of lines of coordinates probably won’t interest you. Instead I’m going to provide you with a picture of how our levels increase in difficulty.

Unfortunately I died on the next wave while screenshotting this, in case you were wondering where Stephen went. 
If you compare the first picture to the 2nd one you can see that there are more enemies and the previous enemies are moving in the same way. This is me building on what the player already learnt. By increasing the difficulty by adding more enemies or different movement I’m achieving a staircase of difficulty. It is however very important that the player doesn’t get 2 new enemies moving in different ways and having different attack animations, thrown in his face at the same time. I want to give the player the basics and when he clears the basic stage I add more interesting things upon that. But the base will always remain the same.

To create interesting levels the game needs to have spikes in intensity. The game cant just get more and more and more and more and more intense. We need it to go up and down. We need to give the player time to rest and reflect over his actions in between the endless waves of fish.

A problem I have stumbled upon this week is that since we’re using a set movement system for our enemies were going to have levels that the player gets completely used to which could be boring. A possible solution to this could be to implement checkpoints.

Another problem is that it take a lot of creativity to create interesting levels. This is not something I can do on the autopilot as I need to sit down and really focus. This has led me to not creating as much play as I had wished for.

Something I consider after this week of work is whether I should be taking on asset placement as well, as this is a part of level creation that my team hasn’t considered at all.

August Wiskås Ek

Lead Design for Selfish

About August Wiskås EK

2016 Game Design

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