After the hammer…
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Seeing as how I missed to check in last week, this will now be my second post about the development process for the game with the working title ”Desolate Echo”. And to be honest last week were primarly dedicated to prepare for the Alpha presentation that I screwed up. Anyway, in this post I will talk about how I went about to research and design the solution to the biggest problem pe,ople have pointed out about my leveldesign, the fact that it’s too complicated to navigate. With its narrow passageways, thight corners and massive caverns the map has a major design flaw. It’s too similar to a maze instead of an actual cavern. Though this had been a conscious decision on my part, I had neglected to consider that the player wouldn’t be able too see the whole map. And it’s only when you see the whole map that you get the feel of a cavern from it. To fix this I had to design terrain and obstacles that would help the player navigate the level and get a sense of direction. In other words, I had to design landmarks. Thus I reached the first obstacle, how do I design landmarks in a top-down 2D pixel cave? First I had to do research on caves and cavernous regions to get into the right mindset. The cave where I got the most inspiration were the ”Lummelunda Cave” hete in Gotland. Seeing as how it had been an inspiration to the inital design I felt that ir could have some impact on my work. Secondly came the research on diffrent crystal formations and types. Finding them proved to be s simple task as the internet is crawling with pictures of crystals and gems. The ardous task was to sift trough all the pictures to find some that I could usr as reference.
This led to the third and final part of the research stage, finding out how to actually draw these in a pixelated manner. This were by far the easiest as I had two great tools that I could use for this, Youtube and my teams lead graphics designer. From Youtube I got tutorials on drawing the crystals and from Peter, our lead graphics designer, a crash course in the program GraphicsGale. All that were left at this stage was to do them. And though it took longer time than I had anticipated I, and the rest of the team, felt that they turned out good and that they fit in to theme of the caverns.
And with that I feel there is not much more to do, than to say thank you for reading this and to finish it. See you next week, hopefully…  |
