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.

Concepts

Here comes the first real update of the semester, ready for it? Last week I did one thing, sketch up ideas. This included ideas for level layouts, secondary environmental mechanics, hazards, and enemy behaviors. These secondary systems are what the content in the game will be built out of and it was very important that we come up with a large pool of ideas we could choose from. The entire team's goal was to sketch 15-30 of these systems and mechanics. I ended up sketching 27 images on my own, some of which contained multiple concepts.

Greenlight is our next big goal for the semester and we're aiming to be ready for it. For us greenlight is about having a solid organization and plan for the semester as well as having a direction for the content in the game that we're confident about. My role in the shenanigans leading up to this milestone is to get some partial levels feeling good that show where we want to take the game. This includes level design work and programming various environmental secondary mechanics as well as maybe some basic enemies. When the pieces of levels I'm creating start to feel good and capture the player's attention I know that my part of the milestone is ready to go. Hopefully I get this done sooner rather than later so that I have as much time as possible to create content.

Start Your Engines!

Hello all. Let me be the first and only person to say welcome to my development blog for this semester. The semester in question happens to be my final one in college so in case you don't want to read the "about me" section let me get you caught up. My name is Jeremiah Warm and I am a senior at Champlain College. I am majoring in game design, minoring in game programming, and loving every second of it, yes, even the late nights. This semester I am on a team named Weathered Sweater (@WeatheredSweatr), a multidisciplinary development team for a class called Senior Production. We are making an action-dogfighting-platformer currently called SkyMech. I am a level designer on the team and am very excited to work on the game with all the other awesome people on the team.

The purpose of this blog is to create a space where I can post updates about what I'm doing each week and other general information about the project. I hope to provide insight into the development of the game as well as capture at least some small part of my creative process. Check back each week for a new post and feel free to check out my portfolio at www.jeremiahwarm.com and follow me and Weathered Sweater on twitter at @JeremiahWarm and @WeatheredSweatr respectively.