|
Before I talk about the actual level design of our game, there are some thing that you may need to know in order to fully get my reasoning.
In our game the player’s lives is represented by bees lined up on the left side of the screen, while the player navigates the “main bee” freely around the screen. The non-controllable bees have the ability to shoot an enemy that gets close enough, but they can also get hit by projectiles and collisions. To handle this, the player can hold down the right mouse button to make all of them surround the main bee in a circle. This provides mobility to the player but also a greater risk in form of movement speed increasing and firing ability being disabled.
Also, worth keeping in mind is that the setting is a forest and therefore the screen is open, and the player moves around freely (but still have to avoid collision).
The level design for the game consists of the order enemies appear in, when pick ups appear and placement of obstacles. The main purpose of it is to make the level increasingly difficult but not too hard and teach the player how and when to use the different abilities.
What I did was to first create a hypothetical level before actually assembling it in unity using the existing prefabs.
The result I came up with was a tutorial level followed by the actual main level. The tutorial features pictures of the mouse moving, left clicking and holding down the right mouse button. They don’t tell the player what it does but a situation where the specific action is needed appears right after it. Furthermore, the tutorial also contains the weakest enemy in the game, the two available pick-ups and a simple obstacle.
The obstacles are the last thing the player encounters in the tutorial and the first thing in the main level. This is to keep the right mouse button ability (that’s used mainly for obstacles) fresh in mind.
The enemies featured in the game are flies, dragonflies, beetles, wasps and spiders. Their difficulty is according to that order, with the spider being the hardest. Naturally I decided to introduce them in that manner, with an exception for the wasp appearing before the beetle. This was to create some variation earlier on as the wasp, along with the spider, shoot projectiles unlike the rest of the foes. With that in mind I had to make different combinations of enemies in a balance without creating a too tough of a challenge early on.
I mainly had two problems in creating the level design. The first one being that the game constantly was updated, it took a while before all the enemies were implemented. I knew the behaviour of them and which were the easiest and most difficult but not exactly how hard they were going to be in practice.
The second problem was that the level I made was too difficult, but the main issue wasn’t necessarily the number of enemies but rather the enemies in themselves. To solve it I removed two enemies, slightly widened the gap between each foe and tasked the programmer with lowering the shoot rate of the enemies.
About Maximilian Kassander
2017 Game Design
|
