Iteration

The name of the game this week was iteration. Specifically iteration on my level design practices. Just to refresh your memory during the critique I got feedback that the levels were paced too quickly and that they weren't big enough. This week I tried my hand at fixing those problems. In doing so I created two new levels which are both much larger and far better paced than my last two. They're much more interesting and much more fun to play. Both incorporate most of the secondary mechanics we've made so far and act as a sort of testing ground for them. I really enjoyed making these levels since they were so much bigger and I could think about the pacing of each one a little bit more. The major disadvantage of these larger levels is that they take longer to make. The other task which I got done this week was to make the level ships destructible. With this feature in the ships are completely playable from start to finish and a huge element of the main gameplay loop is in. The last thing to implement to make the ships truly testable are the enemies and Ryan is hard at work getting through the UI so he can start them. The game is starting to come together now and we're close to just pumping out content.

One of the new, larger ships

A New Face

This week we introduced a new face to the team, Rotorz. No, that's not a really strange name, it's a level design tool that we decided to invest in. While our tools team had a really cool level design tool that they had been working on it was having some growing pains and we needed to get going. We found Rotorz and thought it looked great so we took the plunge. I could not be happier. Rotorz is incredibly easy to use and has streamlined my workflow like nothing ever could. I put the old tileset into it so I could begin playing with it and creating levels. Once Ian had given me the new tileset I put it in and created three levels for the critique.

The result of the critique was overall good. People had fun with what was in the levels but felt like there wasn't that much there. Which there wasn't, enemies aren't in yet so a bug chunk of what the levels will be wasn't present. The more pressing feedback from the critique was that the levels felt small and too fast paced. Thankfully these two issues are easily solved in the same way. The issue with the pacing is that there are no rest areas, it's all action which tires the player out. By adding in rest areas the pacing will be better and the level will get larger. I may still need to increase the size of the ships but it's a solid first step. Finally being able to create some levels easily has given a lot of confidence moving forward. I know that the more I make levels the better they'll get and with Rotorz that process should be much easier.

Investing in Levels

As the intensity of production begins to increase so does the specificity of my work. Over the last week I've gotten started on designs for the smaller ships that the player can enter. This was done in my sketch book so that I would have a lot of freedom with the initial design of these ships. I designed seven ships and another four smaller ships that may be used to teach the player the various environmental mechanics in the game. This is far from the number that will have to made for the in total but it's a good start and got me experimenting with level layouts and mechanics. I also hunted down some issues with the level editor this week that had to do with the origin of the tiles. Basically when the level was built in Unity the tiles weren't in the right place because their origins weren't where they were supposed to be. Working with the level team to find out what was wrong took some time so I unfortunately wasn't able to build any levels this week.

In other rather scary news Midterms are fast approaching. As far as what Weathered Sweater needs to have ready we're in a pretty good place. A lot of what we need is done and what isn't done won't be hard to accomplish in the time leading up to the due date. My work to prepare for this consists of locking down the number of smaller level ships with the team and what secondary mechanics we need to have. In the coming weeks I'll be implementing those secondary mechanics and building a number of the ship levels so that we have a solid and tested build ready. It sounds like a lot of work but the secondary mechanics are generally simple to script and the levels are just a matter of getting a selection of them built and tested so I can iterate on them. I can't believe that Midterms are almost here. I guess time flies when you're having this much fun.

Moving Forward

This week was a completely different experience than last week. This week, rather than focusing on conceptualization I've moved on to prototyping. This includes both levels and secondary mechanics. At the beginning of the week the level team picked five of our favorite mechanics from last week and got to work prototyping them. I did two of these mechanics, spikes and destructible walls. We made a branch of Ryan's new framework to do it in so that we could start understanding it and not have to make too many changes when the framework is done and everything gets merged. In addition to creating those two secondary mechanics I also worked on a few level prototypes. This week these were simple and were mainly meant to get me some experience adding objects to the level editor and to test my new systems. I also experimented a little bit with the basic platforming in the game to see what kinds of challenges were possible. The issue which held me back from really getting going with level prototyping was that the tiles the level building tool was using were huge and didn't give me much control over the level. This issue has already been fixed and I'm looking forward to being able to create some awesome levels.

This upcoming week we're going to have our first critique and I'm both excited and nervous about it. I'm not completely sure just how ready the game will be for it but I think it will be useful nonetheless. I hope to have my prototype levels looked at and played so that I will have a better idea of what is fun and what is not moving forward. I'm sure some of the feedback won't be surprising but the more feedback I get on the subject the sooner I'll able to understand how to create awesome levels for the game.