50 minutes. Drawed on Ipad (sketchclub) using a JotPro
Daily Archives: July 1, 2014
More Swamp Level Design
How to approach level design for a game?
Our idea was to have an open world, and the character doesn’t jump, so the main point was NOT to have a platform level. Making a plain long square as level would have meant though to have a “boring” open field, you pretty much just move forward, so what’s the point?
Therefore we take the big decision and decided to change our minds: the game would have not look like a platform but we needed to remove that depth in order t allow paths: having them would have meant to have binaries and crossroads, having therefore that sense of “paths and hidden paths to find” we wanted.
How to justify the fact you can only move on paths though? how to show in a clear way where you can walk?
Well, at least it was clear what areas should have NOT been walkable: the lakes.
So, I made paths with rocks. I use a different colour tone so that hey are easily visible.
[edit] The method of having a traditional sidescroller didn’t work, so we changed back to the “deph one”.
It didn’t worked both on the character and the monsters: the first fel strangely blocked, the second changed completely the combat system that now looked “castrated” in a way.
The thing is that the paths worked pretty fine and helped defyning and making the levels different, so we decided to keep those, so that even if you can freely move around there will be barriers to block you on determined paths, mantaining the idea of hidden paths: to reach some points you will have to walk back on a different road that was blocked by trees and other stuff. We think that will work.
To strenghten that concept, we decided to keep the non-walkable lakes.
This is a full (not final, but the lenght and paths are final) level design prototype:
Forefront: SoundShapes by Queasy Games
Can music become a level design? Maybe that was the question thhe guys at Queasy Games asked themselves.
The answer is Sound Shapes, a game with a minimal graphic style and design in which going forward on the level means you go forward with the song. Songs that of course are made by top composers, like Jim Guthrie, Beck and Deadmau5.
It may sound like some weird experimentation that turn into a boring game, but the game is actually very fun to play and very hard too!
Even if in the end is a sidescrolling platform, it really feels like something new, and as there’s a level editor too people find themselves not just building levels but building music in the same time! What it the border between gaming and music?
(not just) Architecture for Videogames 