Level Design
|
Recently I have been working on level design. The idea we have behind building a level with everything in a predetermined place, is to make sure we can engineer the experience the player will receive from our game. We want the player to find the game mysterious, feel like they are looking for something unnatural and scary. The way we can do that is to scale down the challenge in terms of enemies. If we have enemies there, we can give the player the sense that they are exposed and in dangerous territory. However, if we emphasize enemies in terms of gameplay, the players’ focus will be primarily on fighting the enemies rather than seeing the terrain, the atmosphere and such. What we have to do then is create a game where the enemies are set out in certain positions and create instances where the player feels the presence of the enemy and the danger, but the danger is not real. As such, we have had to work with the terrain as well as the enemies to try and get as good of a scenario as possible for the player to go through. We have worked in iterations, where me and Simon, the designer of the group, created the first drafts and then I worked with them for a bit. Further down the line, Mikael Ferroukhi made some changes and made the documentation clearer. The first level feels done in terms of content, but the distance between terrain and enemies or the speed of the player might need to change to make the game more interesting.
Working on level design has been interesting to me since it has been proof that I have little idea of how the process is. Certain feelings and dynamics we want to promote have been difficult to incorporate into the level design. This has mostly been because I don’t really know where to start, but with time this has improved and there is some sense to what I did. Again, this is due to the iterations of the design, with input from the whole team. This work has made me understand how important level design is for games, it is in essence the presentation of what the team has worked on. Since it hasn’t really been brought up too much in class yet, I can’t help but wonder if it’s been overlooked or if it is something that will be worked on later. Level design is something I can not wait to learn more about!  |