Dillo's Dilemma - Fort Design

Yo! 

This weekend, I LDD'd and Whiteboxed a 'fort' for our capstone game, Dillo's Dilemma. In this game, you play as Dillo, an armadillo, who can roll around and use mechanical devices resembling pinball parts (called PINGAS) to quickly move around. The levels are relatively open to explore, and contain 4 'forts', which are bases built by evil rats to hold captured armadillos. Each fort is basically a speed challenge, where Dillo must use the PINGAS and his rolling movement to free each armadillo before he's captured by the rats himself. The main goal of the game is to clear each of these forts, and that's exactly what I tried my hand at designing!

For reference, here's an early example of what I imagined a fort could look like. 

Some of the terms are outdated, and the design has changed a bit, but this still gets a bit of the idea across. The idea here is for the player to have any number of potential solutions to this problem- They have to design their own route through the level and then execute on it! 

Months later, when it came time to actually put a fort layout on paper, I'd been looking at screens so much I decided to just draw up some concepts on plain paper. (Or, in this case, the back of my schedule :P )

The idea of using a ramp to launch yourself up to the raised portion of a fort seemed very alluring to me. It worked well with the PINGAS, which could be placed to launch Dillo forward in a certain direction. I then figured you'd probably need a backboard of some kind to keep players from overshooting the fort. 

Something else I'd been wondering about is the size of the fort. It's hard to judge how large or small these things should be exactly. Each fort is just one speed challenge, so it doesn't need to be too long. A fort that's too large might feel odd in the world space, will take more art manpower to decorate, and usually just feels out of place. Alternatively, a fort that's too small is going to undermine the gameplay and be too simple.

This is what I came up with for the LDD. 

Clearly this is a pretty small level- it's just a challenge within a larger level, after all, and the way it's designed, it could take the player multiple attempts to beat. Still, it feels like it might end up being too small. That's something I'm willing to see in play-testing once the player controller is more featured. 

This was my first time really doing a true top-down LDD instead of a side view. I'm not sure how well I got the depth across, and I'm certain it isn't clear which objects you can roll under vs which ones are solid. 

I designed this level to hopefully have a few different routes. To illustrate this, I made 2 extra versions of the LDD to show potential routes the player could take. 

Doing this was very quick, and hopefully shows that there's more than one way to tackle this problem here! I still think I prefer perspective LDDs for showing depth and verticality, but I'll readily admit this LDD took a tiny fraction of the time I'd spend on an LDD before, and that is NICE.