Level design & presentation
Second post of this project!
There really won't be much to write about this past week since the weekend went to other things and then I got struck by a pretty nasty cold. I only got to work on things related to the project these last few days.
What I did work on was drafts of a few ideas for the level design and the alpha presentation.
The level design drafts was basically a few ideas put down on paper about how we could place objects and enemies in different ways on the level to create interesting scenarios. The idea for these scenarios was to create a more interesting gameplay differing from the seemingly random spawn of objects and enemies.
One example of this sort of scenarios would be blockades of bigger objects with smaller objects at a few chokepoints that the player needed to find and penetrate.
Another was to create a wall of parade participants with big objects(parade floats) in them that the player needed to fins and smash through to prevent being trapped. Think of it like one of the mentioned blockades, but moving.
To visualize this, I relied on simple geometrical shapes with letter in them to represent the object or enemy.
In the pictures below, the player is the circle. Objects are squares with their size (small, medium or big) represented by their intial letter. Enemies are triangles - parade participants are marked by a P, and children by a C.
While the level design was my main task this week, I spent far less time on it than I'm willing to admit. Almost the whole Tuesday was wasted because of sickness, and Wednesday and Thursday was spent on preparing the presentation.
The alpha showcase consisted of a small presentation of the team, concept and project progress thus far, and then actual gameplay of the game. As the programmers had their hands full with implementing everything required for the alpha (and I as a designer had the complete opposite situation) I volounteered to hold it.
To prepare for this I created a few slides answering all the questions set up as guidelines and wrote a few lines of notes for the bulletins of each slide. As I was still very sick when this decision was made, we decided that Matilda should replace me if I hadn't gotten better until Friday - hence the notes.
All in all, this week could have proceeded smoother. While I feel confident for the presentation, the level design is something I will defiently have to sit down with this weekend to make up for lost time.
