4th Week of Big Game (Week 18)

This week we worked hard to get ready for the testing session we had this friday. I decorated my map so it would look pretty for the testers. I had to be careful where I placed decorations, so people wouldn't ride into them. I also placed lights, this was a challange, because you need to lead the way with lights, but I also wanted to lit up cool stuff in the world, that ofcourse led to some problems, because players follows lights like moths to a flame. Some problems with the lightmap increased the light of some lights. Players would run into walls because (like the genius I am) I had placed superstrong lights in front of them. 

In some places of the map I had also placed some hills so you couldn't clearly see your next objective, so some people felt a bit lost. So I need to go through my map thoroughly and check so players always see an available path.

Some pics on the decorated map:

3rd Week of Big Game (Week 16)

This week has been a lot of deciding and testing. The maps we had from the beginning did not work out because the areas was to cramped with objects. So you could not steer the character properly. So we went through a load of testing last week. What would be fun to play on, what challanges on the levels should we have etc.

The first thing I did was to try and space out the maps, so you could acually steer in high speeds. Also we changed the maps to a smaller format, so we could each work on a map and finishit it faster. This time we use a model that is more like "here is the theme of the map, now try out some fun stuff and build from that". So perhaps we build some craters and test that, if it is fun, we expand and maybe do some hills that leds from the craters etc. Keeping in mind that we let the player choose different paths.

Here you can see the beginning of the map I'm woring on. The red lines represent viable paths through the map, it's a sandbox though, so in theory you can go pretty much exactly where you want. But since we place boosts these are the general paths viable on the first part of the map. You start to the right and you can clearly see what "cool" paths are presented to you. This map has a lot of open areas in the beginning because it's one of the first maps, so we let the player cruise around a bit more here and experiment with the controls. 

As you can see on this map objects are also very spaced. You have time to see and decid were you are going and in general the map is pretty open. 

First Week of Big Game (Week 14)

Big game project has begun! I am the producer and level designer of our team Freshly Squeezed. We are making an adventure game, you are a robot and you pick up boosts to gain momentum forward. You use this momentum to traverse big open tracks.

We want to create a feeling of flow. We think games like Mirrors Edge and Sonic have good movement gameplay, but your speed is always stopped because of enemies that feel out of place (Mirrors Edge) or enemies you don't have time to see (Sonic). We want to change that.

For more information on the game: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B29qyva6DiC8Z21LdmlQMHlHcG8/edit?usp=sharing

In this first week me and Jonatan have designed levels and part of levels. We are trying to design the maps so you never break flow. We are trying to do this by never letting the player die or get stuck by removing the negative feedback, instead if you fail, you simply don't get the huge amounts of good feedback. We will have restart points where, with the press of a button, you can respawn. So if you fail to do that awesome thing on that huge ramp, the players themselfs will restart and try again to get that awesome highscore or continue on and hope they succeed with the next challange.

The biggest challange with this is to always give players many different paths, paths that are easy with minimal reward and paths that are harder but with greater high score and exploring rewards and create paths on all the places where we think the player might fall down or fail. So they never die, instead get pushed forward but with a lesser overall score. We always have to anticipate where the player might end up, and create a path that leads away from where they might end up, this will requier huge amounts of testing, to see how the players play.

I first sat down and sketched a ton of pictures of what challanges/themes could be fun, I did this for hand so I can't post pictures of it unfortunatly. I needed something to get me started, so eventually me and Jonathan decided on the best sketches and began putting together example levels in 3DS Max.

Here you can see some very early 3D sketches of 2 of the challanges on the first level. I sketched in 3DS Max after the paper sketches to get a theme for the challanges and a very basic general idea of how they would look i 3D space, hights etc. Also making sure they were the right size for our main character. Right now I'm testing the levels in Unity with the character so I know if they are fun. If they are not, we redo them.

I really haven't had that much time to do levels, I've had to do some producer work, which isn't that interesting to talk about.