Tempe Games

For my undergrad capstone game, me and my team worked on a relatively 'closed' open world setting. The player is a shoplifter infiltrating a huge shopping mall. There are nine levels in the game, and they all take place in the same big open level, but the layout changes within each level to provide an effectively unique experience. For example, certain doors are completely locked during some levels, while they're open in others. Early in the game, huge sections of the map are closed off, so the player doesn't have as much ground to cover. Later on, it opens up, granting great agency to plan a route or scramble through many rooms to escape. This whole thing ended up being a massive level design exercise.  In my mind, this was a great way to get a lot of mileage out of one larger level, and since the world was composed of various themed shops, it would be possible for each of our level designers to build levels independently and later drop them into the full world. Of cou...

 Ayo! RPP round 2 has just about reached its conclusion. I learned a few things about the larger level design process which I will share now! First of all, Level Designers get a bad deal during RPP. Apparently, in the industry, you would never be designing a level without having a player controller to play with first. After all, if you aren't sure the exact constraints of your player character, how can you properly design level for them? In a rapid-prototype situation, or something like a game jam, half the time at least is probably going to be spent building the player controller, which means you only get half the time to plan, whitebox, and set dress levels, unless you want to start designing levels before the player controller's ready. I did that last bit, and sadly it ended up being a bit of a waste. Our player controller ended up being much more slippery than I'd expected, so the levels I had designed didn't fit the movement at all.  So yeah, all that LDD and white...

 Yo! I'm once again in a Rapid Prototype Production group with a bunch of super talented individuals. This time, we're making a First-Person movement shooter, wherein the player is a mailman who throws mail into mailboxes. One of the challenges for this project was needing a very solid player controller, so I had a lot of time without a usable player. Most of this time I ended up using to animate our first person hands, but I also designed a tutorial level using a LDD. I didn't want to spend too much time on this, since I wasn't sure what I'd be able to use with our mechanics, but I also didn't wanna just sit around not doing level design! Looking back I almost immediately had problems with this LDD. My biggest critiques are that the depth is somewhat confusing, and the scale is terribly inconsistent. I wasn't sure how it'd translate to gameplay either. Later I made this tutorial level itself, even though I wasn't sure if it was gonna work out. Here...

Yo!  I'm Tempe! I used to be a drifter, but now I'm a student at FIEA. Here's where I'll leave my lessons about level design as I learn 'em. To start, I want to talk about my FIEA Examination Project. I was expecting a lot of requirements from a project like this, but was actually very open ended. I had 2 weeks to make a some kind of level  and make a video showing it off. Since I didn't have a theme to follow, I brainstormed for almost a half second before I thought about making a 2.5D platformer. I'd finished Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Collection on PC and loved it. I hadn't stopped thinking about the game and its levels, so I ended up thinking up a 2.5D platformer level for my project pretty quickly.  My original brainstorming drawing. I always give myself a strict one hour for brainstorming- no less! Originally I had the idea of an island with town a windmill, which the player would move through in 2.5D action platforming, but as soon as I got into en...