Level Design Blog 9

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 builds to work with the emulator. In the future, I'll have to try other options for running the game.

I also continued work on my FPS level. I started by creating the landscape, which I created a rough sculpt of before adding planes with the map I created on top of them. I placed one plane for each of the three levels of the map, and then flattened and sculpted the environment to match the levels.

Since my level is set in a series of ruins built into the mountains, I used Maya to create a set of modular wall and roof pieces to match the buildings of the planet the level is set on, Athenas.

I started with a base series of walls and roofs, which I used to start piecing together sections of the ruins.

As I started blocking out the level, I almost immediately began running into issues with the scale I had originally created the level in. I ended up having to scale the level up significantly from what I had originally written in my LDD to keep the environment feeling a natural size, and to accommodate the enemies I planned to place throughout it.

I thought that using planes with the map on them, however, worked very well for sculpting the environment; I was able to build functional terrain and begin blocking out the ruins and key locations in just a couple of hours.

Overall, I'm excited about the direction my level is going in, and I'm looking forward to working on it more and adding additional details. I plan to begin adding lighting once the ruins are roughly blocked out, so that I can begin getting a feel for how the level will feel and function with Athenas's relatively dark lighting.

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