Dev Blog 4, Level Wrapping
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This week I will be writing about how our design goals and ways to achieve those goals impacted the way our levels are implemented. The camera system in our game is top-down, and the camera controls the pace at which the player progresses. The camera moves upwards on the screen at a set pace. Side to side however, the player is free to move as they wish. The goal with this design is to give a feeling of exploration and freedom, which we think will contribute to our main goal of the game feeling like uncovering a mystery. We also wanted to have a built level where each obstacle and enemy is placed deliberately. We wanted this in order to have full control of the experience the player has. The combination of these two functionalities did need some scripting to get working together. If a player chooses to go far to one side, we don’t want them to run out of level, and we would prefer not to block their path by terrain, which would inhibit the design goal of the free horizontal movement. And since we also didn’t want to have to build levels that were as wide as the player could move, we instead decided that the levels would be wrapped. By wrapped I mean exiting the left side would put you on the right and vice versa. Instead of the common video game mechanic where the player can exit the screen on one side and appear on the other, in our game, it’s everything else that gets moved. If an element in the level is too far to one side, it gets moved to the other side.
To indicate to where exactly the object should be moved, we have a number indicating the width of the level segment, so moving the object is as simple as adding or removing that width to the position of the object. In addition to this wrapping, levels are also split into smaller vertical segments. This means that we can always put the segment that the player is moving into with its actual centre in the centre of the camera view. This once again serves the goal of giving the player the desired experience with each segment, while still having the illusion of freedom Thanks for reading.  |
