RPP 2 Level Design

 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.

Tempe's neato level design drawing
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.

The resemblance is uncanny...!



Later I made this tutorial level itself, even though I wasn't sure if it was gonna work out. Here's the problems I noticed in terms of level design:
  • Platforms don't reveal themselves until you get right to the edge of your current platform, since they're descending. Perhaps our FOV is too low?
  • Downward ramp lets the player get speed, but then immediately forces them to stop. Should add a jump to let the player skip ahead if they slide + jump?
  • Some platforms are too small for how slippery our player controller is.
So yeah, I'm glad I didn't spend more than like 10 minutes on that LDD, and 50 minutes on that level. Designing a level effectively requires an understanding of the player's capabilities, that's pretty obvious, but it gets a bit hairy when you've only got two weeks to make a prototype, and it's going to take half that time to get a player controller set up. Guess that's just how it goes!

Here's a bonus level. This is just to show off my team's gameplay progress for RPP, so all I had to focus on was showcasing our team's art assets and gameplay aspects, such as wall-running, and delivering mailboxes.

You call that a level?!?!




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