Level Design Part 3

As I have the ever pleasant assignment to look over and manage the tasktraker this week, and the sudden problems with the Internet, I will continue where I left off about last weeks levels. It also allows me to tell you about a few things taken up in the comments.

We are three that, in theory, makes the maps complete. I make suggestions for the layouts, our main level designer makes the layouts better – along with placements of enemies and samples, while our main artists makes the art for the maps. After those steps the map goes to the coders.

As for my thought process, I mainly go with what I feel like could work. My goals are to make them easy to navigate, and not very confusing, to make simple basic level overviews.

This particular level is rather linear, but has one big, open space that could be possible to be a bit creative with. Perhaps one of our lurking, tricky fishes – which name I’m currently forgetting – to be placed in an upper place to trick the player up there.

A very symmetric map with great large spaces. It is rather simplistic, and could also possibly be used lying down. Possibly I could have made a few walls jutting inwards as well, or some platform for samples.

This map is rather complicated, and I’m not sure if it could be utilized – it could possibly be a late-game map. Lots of possibility to get lost, but no dead ends. Rome rooms could be removed to make it an easier map to navigate. I might have overdone it on this map.

This is a decietful map in that it looks and feels more simple than it would be. Platforms could be added in the big rooms, for additional room for samples and power ups. It is rather big, and you could easily get lost in such open spaces.

To end this little display, as these were all the last maps, I must say I can’t give better descriptions as I do not have my thoughts while building them fresh in mind. My insperation, borrowed from looking at parts of dungeon maps mostly, ran out at the last map. But after making ten maps, I’d say it was rather to be expected.

As for this weeks work, I really must start working directly, because I had serious complications when I was going to start working, that I had to go to the help desk for help with.

Ambient Pressure Buttons

I spent this week making the buttons for all of the menus and maintaining the Scrum Backlog. As I cannot find 400 words to write about the later, I simply will have to try with the former.

The main issue with the buttons has been to find a suitable font, as well as the changes in what exactly the buttons say. After a couple of times rewriting the buttons – changing font, changing actual words – the buttons have finally settled down at a final look.

There were two requirements we placed upon the font we should use: 1, It needs to be readable on the screen, and 2, it needs to be free for comercial use. Mentally I added a third condition, that it would suit the game. For the additional third condition, I only looked for suitable fonts on dafont.coms categories Eroded, Distorted, and Destroy. Among the fonts I found that I thought suited the games ambiance, only one was free for comercial use. As such it was chosen for the buttons.

That I later noticed that it was the font originally used by the group who built the concept of Ambient Pressure was an unexpected but pleasant discovery.

The pick of the font was originally because it reminded me of the first groups font, and the fact it seems to be dissolving – something certain things does when submerged in water, and thus I thought it would suit the underwater ambiance.

As I was making the buttons, I was also tasked with making sure they can change colour once moused over, which, while done simply by changing text colour, had to be visible on all of the possible places for them to be placed on the game screens. Going from black to a very bright blue was an easy pick – partly for it to be obvious, but also partly to keep to water-y colours.

Due to the choice in colours having to be visible, I decided the best placement for them to be on the lower part of the background, with only the two first buttons on the menu above the middle line. This makes them appear far down, so they don’t take over the screen, and gives a lot of empty space on the screen. The buttons were placed at the right side of the screen due to the suggestion of the level designer.

The buttons remains fairly simple, text-only buttons to melt together with the background a bit – though not too much – and blend in with the otherwise simplistic style of it.

Fancy Mansion

As I’m not quite that good, I don’t have any photos, but today my group was to show our paper prototype of a game we’re designing according to the words of ”Fancy pants” and ”Clueless”… To our teacher.

With fog of war, a great storyteller/game master, and a lot of playtesting, our fany pants rich man with a gun got to chase after the burglar in his home, who kept hiding. Our teacher played very diffrently from our group, taking the route of hiding more often than running.

It was rather interesting, in fact.

A shame he didn’t want to read the rules I attempted to polish so it was easy to understand and well-written.

Either way, we ended up being in the top three of the eight games he played today. A great achievement, I’d say.