Third Post, Fish Game
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Hi again. I am the designer in team shadhavar. Today I will be talking about the level design we went with in our game. Based on the concept document we had chosen the game needed to be restricted to one screen. I personally felt that having a level simply be based on what enemies would spawn was too little level design, therefore I opted for some kind of obstacles to be present. The obstacles purpose would be so that the player had something to use as cover, while also restricting their shooting and movement. However, the process of coming up with a balanced level design that was not too cluttered or too open proved to be more challenging than I had initially thought. The level design also needed to make sense within the context of the game, which further increased the challenge. I began with drawing some different level designs that I thought could work, then I presented them to the group for a vote. We moved forward with three of the level designs but eventually settled for one, that one being design C.
Throught the development process some changes were made to the level design. Initially we had planed to have pipes that acted as teleporters, so that the player, enemies and bullets could quickly go from edge of the stage to the opposite edge. Because of some issues, we had to ditch the idea of having teleporter pipes, additionally most people in the group felt that it would have made the game too easy. The circles that are visable in the drawing above are supposed to represent enemy spawn locations. Because we did not have the time to show the enemy fishes swimming in from the background, the spawn locations were moved to be located inside the previously unused teleporter pipes. During play testing it was also decided that some obstacles needed to be removed form the level, too prevent the game from becoming too calustophobic. Later it was also decided that powerups would spawn in specific location on the level, so that the player would always know where to go when in need of a power boost. The resulting level design can be seen below:
While we might not have managed to make sense of everything in terms of plausibility, the level design still turned out pretty okay. The level is not too cluttered and not too open, additionally it does manage to keep the player aware of their surroundings. On the topic of plausibility I think it is pretty justifiable to have floating rocks/obstacles for gameplayes sake, because of the game being about fish with guns. Hope this was a good read and gave you some insight into the level design process.  |
