Review of Level Design

This week, as a task for environment design, we had to construct a level for a game. The first thing I did was to create a base story for the game, because it helps me in idea generation. Once I get the ball rolling I find story generation rather flowing, since ideas will start to come up with progression of the story.

One of the challenges I found was to detach from the story after constructing the foundation. As soon as I had an idea of what the story is going to be about, I drifted away from level design and was designing the game story. Luckily the lecturer noticed that immediately and drew my attention back on track. learning from my mistake I started to focus on the level itself.

Said so level design requirements still include some general parameters for the game like intended audience, platform and level progression. I decided that the first level would be a tutorial so I was working on level two which is a key level for the story introduction. The aim is that the player controls a creature which is at the top of the food chain, but things change and the hunter becomes hunted. At this point I have set the character to be a huge insect, the area would be a forest and the enemy’s aliens of various types.

In the tutorial, the player will learn how to use the character as movement, jumping, gliding, attacking and feeding so that they will be already comfortable and familiar with it. Then, the first level design is that the player will have to escape from aliens in continuation. I had to keep in mind all the time to make it clear for the player that they have to escape and not fight back. The design of the level itself should help the player know the root, and the amount or strength of the aliens, should automatically drive the player forward to escape since the way back will be closed. This resulted to be quite a challenge to make each area suitable for its use while staying in context. I also believe that this will be resolved and improved by playtesting a prototype, but for now I tried to foresee the player movement and reaction on paper.

Apart from a previous game we built the past semester, I never studied level design, and the five levels we designed for the last game where purely from our gaming experiences and what we thought might feel good for the player. Therefore, you can say that this is the first time I am guided through a level design. Said that we took into consideration a lot of the things we mentioned in class even we did not realize that, and it served as a great experience for us even during play testing.

I love creating, so I loved every step of this level design. Since we were left free to design whatever we liked I was enjoying it 100% and maybe even more at all time. The most thing I love ion design is that I always start from sketching and writing the idea on a piece of paper, then after time [passes you see your creation coming to life until competition, and that for me is a great experience and joy.