Level Design and wave patterns
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Hello
So this week started with the playtest were we got some good feedback. We got a feeling on what´s good and what’s needs improvement. One of the points we got and agreed on was how the enemy waves spawned and the overall raise of difficulty in the game. So this week I have tried to design good waves so the game have a good raise in tempo and difficulty. The execution of this was easy since our programmer made it super easy to change the spawn handler and how it works. By using his script, I could easily change what fish spawned were and how many of them. I will not go into detail on how the script works but if you want to read about that I think Erik (programmer in Unicorn) have a post about that on his blog. Knowing how to make the enemy spawn. I encountered the hardest part of the wave design. Knowing what’s hard and easy. This made itself very clear when I had designed some levels that I thought was fun and challenging. I brought these levels to the group where it results was mixed with some members flying through it with some challenges and some not making it past wave 2. So, I immediately realised that this needs a lot more playtesting then I thought. The whole process slowed down for me as well since I now had to make the waves easier than I thought was fun. Now the work became a bit dull, it made it harder to know if the wave was good or not. Since I thought The first levels are the most important but those were also easy to make since the presentation of enemies should be really clear. When a new enemy appear, you should have time to figure out what’s happening and how its behaving. I solved it by not letting two new enemies appear at the same time. We have 4 different enemies at the time, Some more advanced than others. To present the enemy I made it by a formula to first show the basic enemy after you defeat that wave you face a lot of that basic enemy and maybe one or two of a new one. Progressing in this manner gave a good tempo and made it possible for the player to adjust and figure out what the new enemy did.
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