Level Design Blog 17

Blog 17: 2/19-3/11

Over the past few weeks, I worked on finalizing and polishing my level. Once the initial blockout of the level was due, I had both other level designers and some of my non-designer friends test the level. The most glaring issue I found that I had to fix was that the keys were too difficult to find.

The first fix I tried was to add an emissive texture to the keys and scale them up a bit. However, having only one brightly colored key in each room made the game easier than I wanted it to be, and it was unclear to people which keys corresponded to which doors, so I came up with the idea to create a lockbox.

I made a child blueprint of the locked door that came with the asset pack I was using and added a few more key instances to it. A key can be placed inside the lockbox, opening the door next to it; to open the box, the player has to explore and find three more keys.

The lockbox isn't a perfect solution--it means the player has to search for even more keys than they already are, and when I have more time in the future I'd like to spend time coming up with a stronger solution--but it does give the player a stronger incentive to explore the rooms.

I also found that players were uncertain about what the end goal of the level was supposed to be (getting into the clock tower to scare away the bear). I ended up adding several more pointers throughout the level, including posters on the walls and a few different letters explaining the bell. I also figured out how to hook the letters up to the journal system included in the pack, giving the player more context for what their next move should be.

I realized as I was playtesting this level that it would have been much more helpful to get to this playtesting earlier. I found several problems, like the difficulty of finding and using keys, that would have been easily solvable if I'd discovered them earlier in the process and had more time to work through them. In the future, I plan to start playtesting much earlier, to give myself the time I need to work through the problems I find.

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