We're now on our second iteration of our current prototype for Promo's Quest. Amazingly, all of our basic mechanics are in order! We have a cheese avatar that runs automatically to the left and can jump with player input. We even incorporated some early platforming into the prototype as well as some other neat mechanics. How great is it?
Stupendously great!
But as I played our prototype more and more I couldn't help but get the feeling that our game didn't have that unique feel that we wanted from the get-go. After talking with the team and organizing the assignments for the week, I decided to take on the role of level designer and map out the terrain, platforms and set pieces for the first level. So, I started drawing out the level in a panoramic view - mapping out a tutorial area and other platforming sections. I'm not much of an artist but after my first couple of classes in level design, I felt comfortable doing a "whiteboard" rendition.
When I was done designing the level, I showed it to the team by walking them through each section. I got some great feedback on some areas and we edited and added some features that I had basically laid out but had not thought of yet. There was some concern my team that the although the new terrain was better for the level, it was also harder to program into the game. Yet two days later we had some playable samples with hills in our prototype!
From this point, we are going into crunch time with our artist (Nathan) taking my level design and creating in-game assets. This will make it easier for Max and Vaibhav to set the coordinates for the terrain and finally begin iterating on our final design. Things are still going smoothly but the editing process for us has just begun.
Stay tuned! Same bat-time, same bat-channel!
-Andrew
