Two Schizophrenics The Devblog

A Whole New Level

Today’s post will hopefully be a little shorter than the last, because I’m a little behind schedule. I haven’t been slacking off, honest! I just estimated I wouldn’t need to spend an hour on building a level skeleton on avarage.

Levels! That’s perfect for today’s subject. I’ve been designing all the levels in World 1 past weekend, and they are twelve in total. It’s been a lot of work so far, but I’m afraid twelve levels is actually not enough to please most players. Nevertheless, I’ll give you my work method and my own reflection on it so far.

I started out on paper. I find grid paper works best, since my level editor works with a grid as well. It also keeps you consistent, for instance I always used three squares high and two squares wide as the character size. In the actual level editor characters would only be two squares high, though. Guess I should have checked that out first. I’ll keep it in mind for when I get to design the World 2 levels. I’ll still stick to pencil and paper though, having somewhat unreliable hardware I’d rather have all those hours where I can see them.

Don’t spoil yourself, now!

As for the design method rather than design tools, I gave myself a few guidelines to work with. The big three for me were pacing, diversity and efficiency.
Pacing means that I have to keep in mind what the player is capable of, what ’skills’ have been learned. This being World 1, I also made a tutorial bit which explains how weapons are used, picked up and what the other buttons do. Can’t wait to test those when I finish this World!
Diversity was probably what I personally found most important. One of the first things I learned about game design was that repetitive gameplay is one of the major game-killers. I try to make every level have a different schtick, so to say. Of course I used some puzzle elements more than once, but in general, every level is new or interesting.
Efficiency was perhaps the least of my worries at the time, which means I now have a couple of guns and enemies still left unused in World 1. But I guess not all is lost, since I can still use them for the other Worlds.

So what’s this with Levels and Worlds being capitalised? Well, the way I’m designing the game world, every World has a clear theme and end. And by ‘end’, I mean boss battle. This is not to say after beating a World you go through a menu and select the next World. The way I see it, (after being convinced by someone else, actually) the entire game is connected. After beating the first boss, you walk through the door and end up in the next World. Initially, I had the idea of Worlds being playable separately, and between these you could buy upgrades to fit your play style. The reason I changed it was because these upgrades wouldn’t be meaningful. Sure, you could jump higher or run faster, but I wasn’t fully convinced this would really be worth the effort. So! Now everything is connected, I had to go about savegames differently as well. Before, you could only save between worlds. With the new system, I can just use savestates. I guess I saved(!) myself about a day of work there. What also came along with the new level system, is shops. Before, you could only spend money between worlds, but now I will scatter shops around the worlds so you can spend the money you make on overpriced guns, ammo, lives or healthpacks. I still have to think about all the details, but I’m way happier with the new system.

Woops! Looks like I threw up a lot of words again. Oh well, at least these daily reflections make me double-think everything. But I should get back to work, or you nice people would never get to see the final game!

xoxoxo,

~Brian