Game Design journal 4
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Mikael Ferroukhi date: 01/03/18 5SD064 During this week I have been working on a Level layout design. Up to now, me and my team had been working on our game Umibozu without any real structure concerning how the game actually take place. We knew the enemies, the character and its power ups, the obstacles, the boss and etc.. but we never explicitly said how all of this would be organized inside of the game. At first the idea for our game was to have the level randomly generated, with a defined speed rate for the spawn of the enemies and obstacles, but we soon realized that this was actually not the right way to go for our game. Our idea was that since Umibozu is a game about mystery and discovery, we should first of all implement the possibility for the player to move without any barriers on the side, using a scrolling background, in order to simulate this feeling of freedom and not being “trapped” inside of the camera view so to speak. With that in mind we thought that the continuity of this idea was to have the “world” be randomly generated, so that the game feels really about discovery and mystery, since the player would never find any similitude between the formation of the terrain or the pattern of the enemy spawn. Now what happens is that this last part was in fact a bad idea for a simple reason: even though randomly creating the world seems to be a big advantage to the game, it creates an issue: in our game, there is this mechanic of saving your ammo by lighting the “shadow shapes” with a floodlight so that you can distinguish if it is an enemy behind it or a power up, at the same time you also want to save your battery by not using it too much. The problem is that when altogether the enemies, power ups, batteries , and ammunitions spawns are randomly made (even with a good balancing), the player will very often find himself in a situation where he is unable to shoot or to differentiate the shadows, preventing him from experiencing the most important aesthetic of our game which is discovery, also discovery is brought both by having the time to discover but also by not being overwhelmed by enemies, in which case you don’t try to discover: you just shoot. By taking notes of what the other teams managed to produce during the different play testing sessions, with my team we decided that pre-building the level was the way to go, first of all because there was not a lot of time left before the beta and that we thought it was the most effective way to get something “good” done before the deadline, with more control over what will be present in game etc.. But mostly because If you can control how the different parameters of the game (spawn rate, enemy rate, level layout), you can control how much and how the mechanics have to be used (shooting, moving, lighting, etc…), and therefore you can control what aesthetic is produced by the game. This is utterly important for us as Umibozu is primarily a game about feeling an aesthetic, not a challenge. At this point there was one thing missing: pre-building the level, which means creating a level layout design. After having done an heavy brainstorming session with the team and searching for the best way to develop our level layout, I decided to put in onto paper so that my team would have a one page reference to look at anytime they are unsure about what exactly will happen in the game (for the Beta), this way we can all follow the same direction and the programmers will now exactly what has to be done.
This was the first draft I had done, the very same day as the brainstorming session. It was complete but I did not like it for the simple reason that there was some subtleties not apparent on it, which means that programmers could actually get stuck at some point and only rely on their memories from the meeting, and also because it was made in a short amount of time, without much caution about the lines etc… It basically could have been made better.
This was my second and last draft, it looks very similar to previous one, which is normal because the main content is the same, the only difference is that it “looks better” and also that this time it leaves no room for misunderstanding: every piece of information is there and every subsection of the level is detailed in term of content, camera movement, player character actions, etc… With this done, my team has been able to work this week with a clear objective in mind and to produce to the best of our abilities the Beta version of our game.
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