Designing level 0 - The Castle

The design of level 0 is one of the most important levels as the player need to build a story in his mind even before the game character and the princess start a conversation. The princess will never say that the player is saving her nor that she will fall in love with him. It will be all the players assumption.

Therefore, we need a strong visual communication. First, we plotted out how the scene would look like from our own mental models. We decided to have: a castle with the character in front of it, the princes in a balcony of the castle talking to the character, and a door with 5 locks behind her.

The reasons are that the castle and princess is often represented in stories of knights saving the princess in distress and the door behind her would make the player assume that it’s the door blocking her freedom, which this will be reinforced once she asks the player to help her gather 5 golden keys.

To support our theory on our princess mental models we looked at famous princess stories like: sleeping beauty (1995) by Disney, Shrek (2001) by DreamWorks and Super Mario Bros (1985) by Nintendo.

In Sleeping Beauty (1995), after the princess Aurora is cursed and Maleficent, the antagonist, takes the princess to her castle where she falls into the spell and sleeps forever. The prince then saves her from Maleficent’s castle (O'Cain, 2017).

Figure 1: Maleficent's Castle

(Lewis, 2017)

In Shrek (2001), After embarking on a quest to save his swamp, Shrek saves princess Fiona from a castle guarded by a dragon (Film_Fan, 2017).

Figure 2: Princess Fiona in castle

(WikiShrek, 2017)

In Super Mario Bros (1985), the antagonist Bowser kidnaps princess Toadstool and her people and locks them up in seven of his castles. The objective of the brothers is to save the princess and her people from Bowser (Self, 2017).

Figure 3: Mario saved princess from Bowser's castle

(Vas, 2017)

Keeping these famous stories in mind we then created some concept art and made simple 3D model to block out how is going to look.

Figure 4: Castle Concept Sketch

Figure 5: Castle 3D Blocking and Adjusting

Figure 6: Adding detail

The finished product looks like the image below.

Figure 7: Final Scene of Level 0

Said that, this is still susceptible to change in order to make it fit better with other levels or to facilitate in game experience or use.

References

Film_Fan, 2017. Shrek (2001). [Online] Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/plotsummary [Accessed 15 January 2017].

Lewis, D., 2017. Maleficent's castle (Sleeping Beauty). [Online] Available at: http://oncepodcast.com/once-upon-a-time-podcast-038-a-land-without-magic-part-1-fairy-tale-land/maleficents-castle-sleeping-beauty/ [Accessed 15 January 2017].

O'Cain, D., 2017. Sleeping Beauty (1959). [Online] Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053285/plotsummary [Accessed 15 January 2017].

Self, D., 2017. Super Mario Bros. (Video Game 1985). [Online] Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177266/plotsummary [Accessed 15 January 2017].

Vas, G., 2017. The Romantic Moments In Video Games That Remind You Of Valentine's Day. [Online] Available at: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/02/the-romantic-moments-in-video-games-that-remind-you-of-valentines-day/ [Accessed 15 January 2017].

WikiShrek, 2017. Fiona. [Online] Available at: http://shrek.wikia.com/wiki/Fiona [Accessed 15 January 2017].