The main focus of my work this week was primarily focused on level design. However before I could start thinking about designing a level I needed more information like "what types of enemies would populate the level?", "what sections are there?", "what power ups are where?", all important questions that if not answered would likely lead to me having to redo a lot of work.
Game Design
My work for game design this week revolved around setting up the document for our GDD and then ideating and brainstorming with Herman so that we could start on level design. Our first order of business was deciding how many sections and what kinds of sections we wanted in our game. We agreed on four different sections, Tower Base, the starting area, Hell's Ascent, the right side of the tower, Ash Falls, the left side of the tower and The Vermillion Summit, the final area. This lead to us needing to figure out what enemies were where and what kind of abilities they had. Herman and I discussed ideas and put them to paper, in particular the ones I focused on were the three in the image below. A lot take inspiration from a variety of other platformers and especially Hollow Knight at the insistence of Jonathan.
With this now completed we had some solid ground to begin at least doing rough blocking of our room designs until the group finalizes the movement of the player.
Level Design
As mentioned prior, we began level design for this week. So as to not cause potential issues with overlapping design Herman and I use Figma to create a module based system around design this way we can add and swap out rooms with relative ease. My rooms for this were created around the idea of introducing the player to the game's controls and concepts in an environment that is still punishing but the lessons are obvious.
In the example of this room, the player is made to use wall sliding, one of the starting game abilities to reach the other side without taking damage from the spike pit (the rectangle with an S) below showing the use of it in a situation where the player will be punished if they mess up but not unfairly so.
This being another example where he I have the intention of showcasing enemies as well as tinder caches, a large currency deposit given to the player if they find a secret or complete a jump challenge. In this example I have a fairly basic one to try to be more inviting for players who might not have the same amount of confidence as others.
Reflection
Reflecting on this week, I wish I did more but I also didn't want to over commit since I didn't know how exactly the player was going to control and didn't want to have to toss a bunch of ideas that I would have tried to develop. However this is only one week and there are plenty more to go. The plan moving forward is: -Complete Starting Area Level Design -Implement Some of the Starting Area Level Design in Unity for Testing
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