The meeting last night went great. The team seemed to be in great spirits about our game and are working on tweaking a few minor aspects to the experience. Most of them deal with enemy A.I and adjusting our character's walk animation with their walk speed. Seeing how much my teammates have built in what has been essentially a 2 1/2 week development cycle (including the holidays!), I volunteered to complete the construction of our tutorial. I have had the most experience with level design in past projects, and I recently completed an entire class in level design taught by EA Salt Lake's, Joe Bourrie. I just seemed like the right man for the job. Then I sat down and began crafting it...Read on to see what it looks like!
Not too bad if I do say so myself. I make it sound easy, but each area in the layout of this environment needed to show off a particular aspect of our game's mechanics. After thinking about it quite a bit, I decided to make a list of mechanics and how they flow into one another. From there, I broke the level into four parts - each corresponding with a main mechanic.
The first mechanic that I focused on was environmental interaction. Because the game is heavy on the idea of discovery using the environment, I decided to place vegetation on the playable boundaries of a long, winding path. You will notice that our game is mostly dark, and the vegetation gives off light. This is why I placed them on the edge of the path, to sort of simulate lamp posts placed on either side of a busy street. It is a familiar feeling of direction.
Next, I wanted to show off the duality of our game world - that the player is not in a strange space-like darkness but rather in an unusual, dense jungle. To showcase this, the team came up with a strobe effect similar to creepy polaroid scenes in horror movies. Only instead of using the effect to scare the player, we're using it as a way to reveal the actual world they are placed into. Narratively, we explain this effect away as the player's flashlight is broken and can only shoot a polaroid-like flash of light out into the environment ever 2 seconds. In order to help translate this mechanic, I decided to exercise the opposite strategy of the previous area. Instead of placing vegetation on the edges of the playable path, I dispersed them in the middle. This allows the player to use the strobe effect and get an immediate picture of what is in front of them.
The last two areas to be created are essentially just combat arenas, so enemy and game world object placement are very important to its success. For the first area, not only is the first enemy type revealed but it is also the first time that the player will see the weaponized flashlight functioning properly. As the player crosses into the area, the strobe effect is replaced with the real flashlight in the game. Shortly after the true flashlight is revealed, the player encounters the lizards - our basic "minion" enemy type of the game. I placed the lizards in a pattern that once the player knows how to dispatch one of them with their new weapon, they will be challenged with two of them, then three. This way, I can offer a picture to the player what gameplay flow is like in basic combat arenas. The last area, is more of the same as this one, only it introduces a different enemy type - a flying enemy. Because there is no difference in defeating either enemy, the last combat arena is nearly identical to the previous one.
And that's a little (really a lot) of insight into how I created the level that you see above. Hopefully my audience tomorrow will concur with these points and my team is selected to represent the University of Utah in the Ubisoft Game Lab competition.
Now onto creating the pitch and practicing the hell out of it!
-Wish us all luck
Andrew
