RPP Level Design Part 2

 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 whitebox from last week's blogpost was scrapped completely.

Here's a new level I ended up making. Since this game takes place in a dream, I wanted to have weird fucked up type levels, which includes weird geometry. I love ProBuilder but my plans were simply out of its scope, especially for the purpose of the UV mapping on the road, so I just modelled the level in Blender first and imported it. After that, I can still edit it in Unity, which is great!

Untextured blender version!

First art pass!

Final version!

This was the second game I made- The first stage was a relatively linear run through a set of obstacles. In this game, I wanted an example of all the different ways you could design a level for it, so this one was meant to be more open-ended and allow the player to plan their own route. There's two main paths you can take in this level, but there's also an opening in the fence the player can shoot through if they're clever! 

The next level is another approach I wanted to try, having a route the player needs to follow which wraps around on itself for a return trip. This kind of level is very predictable for the player, and easy to plan for. Backtracking gets a bad rap but if the return trip has different constraints it's not really a problem. It's also pretty efficient, you can make a level like this in half the time. 

This is pretty much the point where I started getting a feel for what was "fun" using our character controller. The next level I designed was another pretty much straight forward run down a spiraling mountain, but since the player needs to shoot each mailbox without missing it's still a challenge. 

I think that's an important part of "finding the fun" as a level designer. You can't really do that without closely understanding the game's 'feel', and as a result, each level I designed feels more fun than the last, not because I ordered them in a specific way, just because I understood more and more how the game was fun to play, and how to design the levels to support that kind of fun. My only regret is not having more time to experiment with the player!