Game Design 2: Blogpost #4, Balancing and level-design
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During the making of our game Behemoth, we found it important that we wanted the game to feel challenging but also fair. A lot of time was spent tweaking the difficulty in accordance to different people’s input about the game (you can read more about this in blog #5). The tutorial of the game is set up to introduce the player to all the main mechanics that they will need to use in the later levels. The first two levels of the game are set up to slowly get gradually harder and harder by spawning larger or harder to deal with waves of enemies while never overwhelming the player by making the levelmanager of the game wait for all enemies to get destroyed before spawning the next wave. The final level of the game is different from the previous in small ways that make it challenge the player a lot more while not being immediately obvious to the player why. As the previous levels have a simple variable that makes the levelmanager wait for all enemies on-screen to die before spawning new ones, level 3 does not and instead spawns everything on a timer which forces the player to kill the enemies fast or risk being overwhelmed. This is set up so that the next wave of enemies are timed to spawn almost immediately after the fastest time the player could kill the previous wave. One things we found important during the creation of Behemoth was that we wanted the player to always have different choices for how to beat the game. In level 3 in particular you must manage your energy and power-ups well as you almost cannot beat it using only the standard cannon projectiles. For instance it is a good strategy in the game to hold the shield on the upper or lower side of the screen while aiming the cannon and using its laser at the other side while dealing with multiple kamikazes however this uses a lot of your energy which you might need later to deal with many enemies getting onto the screen at once as a result of you doing this. I feel that this gives the player some interesting choices to make during the gameplay as your choosing to use your energy to deal with what you yourself consider to be the biggest threat to you. Another important thing for the level-design in our game was to make the different levels not just get gradually harder but to look and feel different. This is achieved by having different colour pallets for the backgrounds going from an orangey yellow to dark red and finally blue. You can click the images bellow to see snapshots of level 1, level 2 and level 3 in that order.
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