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.