The current level design and how we introduce the narrative

This week I’ve mostly focused on level design, which hasn’t been implemented in the game yet in any form so I will mostly discuss the current level design. Several weeks ago we settled on a basic wave system that increased the spawn rate of the enemies in the level. I wanted to do this because even though it wasn’t anything permanent or perfect, I felt that it was important for the player to get used to shooting and moving around in an easy environment instead of getting swarmed by enemies instantly.

1. The current wave system starts off with the most basic enemy, which is a piranha that stalks you. Is is very easy for the player to simply shoot and eliminate the single piranha that swims toward you.
2. A swarm of piranhas will swarm toward you, just to increase the difficulty level a bit, but with the same enemy still.
3. We introduce another enemy, the swordfish, which is an enemy that shoots toward you once it “sees” you. This wave also includes some of the piranhas.
4. We introduce the blowfish, which shoots out spikes once the player shoots it or if it gets close to you.

We decided to introduce the enemies in this fashion, for now, to not overwhelm the player, and to make sure that the player can get used to the controls and how each enemy attacks.

We’ve also worked on an interactive cutscene to introduce the player to the narrative of the game. I felt that it was important for the player to get an idea of what is going on and why a fish would have a gun and shoot other fish. To do this we wanted to have an introduction sequence that where you can’t shoot or get damaged yourself, but you instead try to grab for food that is sent down. Every time the player gets close to a piece of food enemies will rush forward and take the food right before the player gets it, and we wanted this to happen a few times as well. If it only happened once it would be a very harsh and strange introduction, so we want the player to feel frustrated that they can’t grab the piece of food. To show Stephen’s frustration we are planning on changing his facial expression every time the food gets taken from him. Stephen will get frustrated to the point where the frenzy meter fills up each time a piece of food is eaten before him, and we plan on introducing the frenzy mode to the player by having Stephen be in the frenzy mode when the player starts shooting the enemies after the cutscene. This is to properly show Stephen’s anger and to show the player how the frenzy mode works.
I also felt that it was important that the player themselves get to play this part, instead of just watching a cutscene. If we allow the player to play and experience this, they will feel the frustration themselves as they race for the piece of food.

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Even though we’ve planned this, the narrative is not the focus of our game, so we’ve decided to make the cutscene skippable. I thought about making the cutscene mandatory to play for the first time so that the player will experience the narrative at least once, but almost instantly realized that this would cause an incredible amount of work. We’d have to implement separate player profiles for each player, which is not realistic with the time we have.

About Emilia Daniels

2016 Game Design

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