Fancy Mansion: Level Design
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So for the past two weeks, in between coding more items aka powerups and doing some bugfixes, I’ve been working on a level design for our game, to replace the boxy placeholder we had for alpha. I had a couple of considerations while working on the level design:
In order to address these two aspects, I started thinking about a “centralised” level design: if the balcony, the drop-off point to which the player repeatedly returns, was in the centre of the level, and the enemy’s patrol around it, the player would always have to brave the enemy’s patrol path in order to drop off stolen goods. I took inspiration from a level design in Thief II: The Metal Age (the Thief games being some of the quintessential stealth games): 
Keeper’s Chapel in Thief II: The Metal Age Iterating on this kind of centralised concept, I came up with a new level design that the rest of the group was enthusiastic about: 
Player’s movements in green, the enemy’s patrol in purple. Click to enlarge. With this new level layout, the player, starting on the centre balcony, always has to pass the carpeted area, where Otto, the enemy patrols. In order to unlock the four electrified gates that block access to the prototype, the acquisition of which is the player character’s main goal and the win condition for the game, the player must find all four keys on the map. Remember, the player has a small light radius with thick fog of war beyond, and has no minimap to guide them. If you compare my new level design to the previous one from the alpha build, I think we’ve created a more challenging, intriguing layout. 
Alpha level layout. Green box is the balcony drop-off point, green lines are player’s movements. Red lines are Otto’s patrol route. Every step the player takes emits soundwaves, expressed by both an audio effect and a visual soundwave animation. Otto’s sprite now has collision with these soundwave effects. On a detected collision between the soundwave and Otto, Otto enters his Investigate State, a state in which he will path to the waypoint closest to where the collision was registered (let’s call that the Sound Origin). Once Otto is at the nearest waypoint in his patrol route to the Sound Origin, he will taunt the player (“I can hear you, thief! I know you’re hear somewhere!”) and being to walk around the Sound Origin area. After six seconds, if he has not found the player, he will return to the nearest waypoint and continue his patrol route from there. Several floortiles, indicted by a cracked floor visual, are “creaky tiles:” they emit a loud sfx and visual soundwave much larger in radius that the player’s normal footsteps. Since Otto’s sprite has collision with player-created soundwaves, this larger soundwave has a higher risk of aggroing Otto. The player will need to pay attention to the floortiles in order to avoid the creaky ones. This is made more challenging by the small light radius around the player, and the darkness beyond. Should the player’s boomerang collide with a wall, this will likewise produce a larger soundwave to represent a louder sound, and the gramophone, a lootable object, will being to play when picked up, producing larger soudwaves as the player carries it. 
The visual soundwaves emitted by the player’s footsteps, and the boomerang which has just collided with a wall. Alright, I’m tired from doing bugfixes before our beta presentations tomorrow morning. More next week, and a playable version of the game uploaded here soon!  |
