Week 5 - Designing the Final Level
This week my objective was to have the paper design of the final level ready and I achieved that. Also, I manage to blockout most of the level in UE5 except some of the enemy positions.
I wanted to analyze what I had done so far with the level in order to know how to continue. To do this I used a system where each “room” in the level was judged based on 3 components. The puzzle component, meaning if this room contained a puzzle challenge and what did this challenge ask of the player. The narrative component, this being if the room tells a story to the player. Finally I used the reward component, which checked if the room provides rewards to the player. I aimed to have each room deliver at least 2 out of the 3 components.
The first step was to separate the level in “rooms”. To define what is a room I looked at the events the player can find in the level. Each room has 1 event or multiple related events. In the end I defined 7 different rooms.
Once all the rooms were defined, I was able to see how well each one delivered on each of the components. In the end I learned that I did a good job for the most part in delivering the puzzle and reward component. The puzzles were different enough and created a good difficulty curve. On the other hand, My narrative component was pretty weak around the board. Another discovery I made was that some of the challenges felt too drawn out, while others were considerably shorter and easier. This had to be fixed.
The first step I took was creating room 7. This is the empty space I didn’t manage to design last week. I made this a high risk high reward room. It has the biggest amount of enemies of any room in the most difficult arrange while providing the player with the most amount of rewards.
The next step was to redefine the puzzles that felt too long. I choose to take the parts of these puzzles and create 2 different ones. Solving any one gives the player a way to access the key to the goal but each one presents the player with different challenges. This allowed me to create difference in kind and freedom for the player to choose how they wanted to tackle the question of the level.
After doing this I proceed to blockout the level as much as possible. Doing this showed me that I had to change the layout of the room where the player obtains the key to the goal. The original layout didn’t give the player any reason to want to go to that room even though it was crucial they wanted to go there to finish the level. With the new layout the player can see the key to the goal from the starting point and getting closer gives them an idea of how to reach it.
Finally, I had to think about how to better deliver the narrative component overall. After analyzing each room individually and as a whole I manage to do this a bit more but it still requires work. I will stop working on this for now as this can be explored more when we add the final art assets.
In short, this was a week of analyzing a lot of what I had done so far with the level and polishing each part to deliver the best experience possible. I did struggle creatively at the beginning and felt a bit lost but after analyzing the level from the perspective of the 3 lenses I managed to progress. The final design of the final level looks like this:
My objective for next week is to blockout the whole level and start designing the previous levels. Each level I design from now on will work as a tutorial for one of the challenges and mechanics present in the final level.
