Jacob Harvey - Level Designer
Idaho Smith: The looters of the penultimate, recently rediscovered pyramid
Role - Designer
INTRODUCTION
This game was created as part of a 3rd-year collaborative module in which I worked with a team of around 17 people. This team was a mixture of 2nd years who took the role of juniors and 3rd years who took the role of seniors. On top of this, there was also a mixture of designers, tech, and art skill sets. The game itself is 1st person puzzler where if you get the solution wrong you will be hurt.
GENERE
First Person Puzzler
RESPONSIBILITIES
-
Design and document puzzles and levels
-
Design and document mechanics
-
Whitebox levels and puzzles into the engine
-
Implementing mechanics into the levels
-
Set dressing and meshing out of levels
-
Creating title screen environment
-
Testing prototypes of art/mechanics and providing feedback
-
Communicating between other members of tech and art teams to produce mechanics and art for the project
-
Organising design team
-
Creating tasks for the design team
-
Assigning tasks for the design team
-
Supervising design team tasks
-
Providing feedback and help to other design team members
-
Provide information and progress of the design team to project supervisors
-
Creating Design Document
LEVEL PRODUCTION
PRE PRODUCTION
Luckily before starting this project, I had worked on Block Move which was a puzzler so I was able to transfer a lot of research into this project which meant a lot of the pre-production was figuring out how the game would play and USP. The basic premise of the game of being a puzzler that hurts the player for getting it wrong was the main USP.
DEATH AND RESET
Upon death, the original plan was to have the player be reset to the beginning of the game so that the game would act as a kind of rouge lite puzzler. That the player would learn from their mistakes as they play more and learn how to dodge and get around the traps. However, as we played it more it became evident that it was slightly frustrating, so we changed it to still reset progress but not set the player back to the beginning but rather a set of few checkpoints. This still did however inform level design which I will go into further down.
HOW PUZZLES WORK WITH PROGRESSION
The puzzles acted to lock the exit to the room. Upon the player getting a puzzle right It will provide a way to unlock/progress to the next room. This also can be applied to the level design principles for my levels as I used that to allow players upon revisiting the level upon death to circumvent some of the repetitiveness as they would already have access to the knowledge needed to unlock the way to the next room.
LEVEL DESIGN
For my level design, I took 3 main considerations
-
How do I make it firm but fair?
-
How can I reduce the amount of time take on it when a player has to repeat it upon death?
-
How can I make my level section visually impressive?
The reason that I chose to make making my levels visually engaging is that the nature of the game requires the player to do a lot of methodical thinking and use the environmental clues to solve the puzzles. Making the levels visually engaging allows me as a designer to draw attention to key clues as well, break up monotonous otherwise repetitive room layouts as well as making enhance the theming of an ancient tomb and sense of adventure.
Breakdown of my design process to the finished level using one of the sections that I designed as you can see it uses the principles mentioned above.
MECHANIC DESIGN
For this project I also my role to design some of the mechanics for the game. For this, it was designing mechanics that could be combined but also fit with the ancient tomb theme. On top of this, I needed to make sure that the mechanics that I designed have a way of communicating to the player as well as a way of harming the player if they get it wrong.
LIGHT PUZZLE
ROTTATING FLOOR PUZZLE
SEQUENCE BUTTONS
LINK TO DESIGN DOC