Level 5
During this week I focused on making level level 5 and had some time to prototype the general idea for level 6. In level 5 we introduce the rotating enemies which have been the hardest enemies for players to deal with. To give the players the space to focus on this enemy type to learn how to deal with it, I chose to make the level shorter and simpler than the previous level.
As mentioned before, to create a focused experience this level ended up being on the simpler side, but before I arrived at this decision I had to iterate a lot. The first 3 design ideas were a larger and complex level which had the aim to keep increasing the difficulty to keep the player engaged. These designs, though good in theory, kept feeling too complex or too empty meaning that after the third complete iteration of the idea I had to stop and approach this from a different angle. One thing that I liked about the initial iterations was the cyclical nature of the levels and how the end of the level was visible from the beginning. Thus I took those two aspects plus the idea of focusing on the new mechanic to make a level that was easy to digest and based all its challenges on getting used to the new enemies.
In the final version of this level I placed the player right next to the exit from the beginning, which is locked. Walking a short distance to the opposite side will show the location of the button to unlock the door to the exit. From there the player has two clear roads they can take, one with a softer difficulty curve and one with a harder start but that gets easier after that. In the middle the players can choose to return to the initial area to either finish the level there and then or take the other road from the start instead of continuing it from their initial course.
For level 6 to empathize the idea of the hollow square motif and to make it bigger than any previous level as it will be the final level for the initial city, at least for now. For now I am thinking of using multiple large and concentric hollow squares for the player to move on, kind of like a boxel version of a roman coliseum. Next week I’ll play with the idea to get a concrete design.
