Level Design Blog

Blog 10: 11/12-11/18 This week, I continued work on our final RPP project. Once the level layouts were complete, I moved on to populating the levels with a combination of premade tiles and artist-made assets. I haven't worked with super stylized assets like this very much, so I enjoyed getting to work within such a strict theme.     Several of the levels, including the one above, changed somewhat both by necessity and for the sake of aesthetics. One thing I found difficult with such a limited set of assets was conveying the difference between the friction materials we had created within the context of the more nature-themed levels. I ended up using more winter-themed materials for the ice and summery materials for areas with more friction.In the future, I would want to put effort into defining the definitions of different materials before using them, and maybe even select assets with that intention. I also added special pickup objects: three strawberries per level and the occa...

  Blog 9: 11/6-11/12 This week, I began work on my newest RPP project, a physics puzzle-based mobile game. It was an interesting challenge to start thinking about designing puzzle levels, since I haven't spent a lot of time working with pure puzzle mechanics.  Our game involves tilting a mobile device to move a platform, causing a ball to roll across it. The goal is to complete the obstacle course and reach the end of the platform. There are a few different materials that the platform can be made of: a regular material, a low-friction ice material, and a high-friction glue material. I wanted to try to work with these materials to create challenges for the player with obstacles like ice ramps to gain speed and narrow glue platforms for the player to balance across. One of the main challenges I ran into while prototyping was with testing the levels. Since we were planning to build for Android phones, which I don't have, I tried to use an emulator, but wasn't able to get the b...

Blog 8: 10/30 - 11/5 This week, I finished working on our RPP project. For the final touches, working with the rest of the team, we made sure that the outlets were fully functional and tinkered with the physics to make them feel more realistic. After testing the level with people who had never played it before, I found that one of the puzzles in particular was very difficult for people to solve, so I moved things around to create a more obvious path for the player, while still maintaining some difficulty by adding an additional outlet. Although I thought the level ended up looking good as a standalone level, we got the feedback that the level of destruction within the house didn't match the story that was presented. I thought this was very good feedback, and in the future, I would want to incorporate story elements earlier into the project to keep the visuals from straying too far from the story that was being presented. I also worked on my metrics level. The key components that I ...