Level Design & Game Design

When working on this project I knew I had to find a quick and good pipeline to set dress the levels since there was 32 levels. I had a variety of different models that was created into prefabs in unity. I created combined prefabs with all the models, to speed things up with the proping I made 3 different sets of prefabs per model. For example, this made it so I didn't have to manually place out all plants on the rocks per level. Instead, all levels were set dressed faster and kept the same quality.

(Using leaderboards to improve the levels)

Spare Party is a single player & a local co-op game, based around getting through the levels as fast as possible. All this while having  difficult, but fun controls to master. The levels have several traps that can decapitate the players in different ways.

In this project, we had leaderboards and were able to collected data from all the playtests from different sessions. Through this, we were able to get information about, total deaths, time, the number of attempts and so on. With all this available we could read the data and tell what levels were the hardest and what the average time the levels are completed in.

This helped us a lot when it came to balancing, progression and many other things to improve the game.

(Normal VS nightmare mode)

In our game "Spare party" there was a big difference when it came to the levels in Normal and Nightmare mode. Normal mode consisted of the first 20 levels and was designed to be completed by most people who played the game. Nightmare mode was a different story, it was more aimed at people who would think the game was too easy. This was because we still wanted all sorts of players enjoying our game regardless if they were a "casual" or hardcore" player. Since our game feels related to many cell phone games gameplay wise and they are usually more aimed at a casual audience, there was a lot of discussions regarding these two modes and what it meant putting them into the game.

In the early development of the game, I played around with a lot of ideas for levels. Since we were going to have 32 levels, they had to be very different to not make it repetitive. What I learned from designing so many levels in such a short amount of time is that the big picture is more important the individual level. This was very true to this game, as I said before our game felt a lot like a cell phone game in many ways. So it wasn't about creating one super polished level that was the best, it was more about creating unique and refreshing levels to keep the player interested and wanting them to play more.

Tools:

Specification:

My contributions:

S

School project: 9 weeks

Level editor: Unity 3D

Engine: In-house

Team size: 11

2 Level Designers

3 Artists

6 Programmers

L

Game design

Export tools - scripting

Level dressing

Difficulty balancing

Quality assurance

Movement tweaking

Collision models

U

XML

Adobe Photoshop

Autodesk Maya

Notepad ++

In-house tools