Level Design
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The most important task i currently have ongoing is creating the level layouts for our game. Aetherial has an aesthetic goal of making the player feel like a champion, of which I interpret the difficulty of the game will largely convey. And so I am attempting to find a good balance between making the game difficult while at the same time empowering the player, making them feel like they are really good at the game quickly. Creating and testing levels is particularly hard because it feels like I’m attempting to complete a puzzle with half of it’s pieces missing. There are planned enemies, obstacles and player abilities that are incomplete or not implemented yet, which makes my level planning feel a bit arbitrary since I can’t actually test the difficulty of something that does not exist. The beta deadline’s soon approach requiring the game’s challenges to be “close enough” implemented amplifies my issue. At the latest play-testing session it became apparent that placing out enemies and obstacles without much thought made the game next to impossible if you didn’t know the layout beforehand.
I am personally not very fond of tutorials, it’s fine if they exist in a game but they should be optional. I want our game to ease the players into it, allowing them plenty of time to learn how the game works before ramping up the difficulty. The only thing that would feel tutorial like would be a simple “how to play” keyboard layout instructions that could be shown in the menu before the game starts. An interesting (and slightly frustrating) part of designing the levels is that their length are limited by the length of the background. Though the background will divided up into three segment to act as a kind of checkpoint, there is a fairly limited amount of space i can work with. To help me achieve my overall goal, i have given each segment a sub-goal for the design. The first segment will introduce the player to the game and its enemies, and will be of easy to moderate difficulty. The second segment will throw a lot more enemies to try and swarm the player, putting what they learned in the first segment to the test. And the last segment will mainly contain the boss entity (although I am unsure of anything beyond that since the boss isn’t implemented yet at this point in time).
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The level layout used for the play-testing session would completely swarm the player.