I am the lead designer of group 2, and we are the team that is making Dimensional Delivery. I learned a lot of important things about our game over the course of this sprint, and they will have a direct impact on how we, or at least I, will spend the last sprint of this project trying to refine our game.
During the sprint, I mainly worked on finishing the remaining list of sprites which I had been given in the previous sprint, and moving on to creating level difficulty variants for every level that we had currently implemented into the game. There were a few random issues that popped up from doing this. One thing that evaded me for a decent amount of time was that even though I had not created many of the assets myself and had used prefabs to put them into my level, some levels did not have any of the assets as prefabs and were not updating accordingly as a result. I manually fixed each of these levels, but it was not until the end of the sprint that I recognized the reason why–whenever I went to build a new level, I took a previously built level prefab and unpacked. However, instead of just unpacking the prefab, I unpacked completely, which also unpacked the child prefabs within the overall level prefab and caused my issue. It was fortunately a minor one, but it did cause a few issues when it came to my overall time management.
Another issue that I ran into was that even though all I was doing was extrapolating off of previous level designs, some level designs are incredibly difficult to create difficulty variants of. This is for the specific reason that some of the levels were designed solely with one goal in mind: teach the player how to interact with a mechanic. Designing variants of tutorial levels will most likely prove to be my greatest challenge for this sprint rather than simply dealing with the volume of levels that I will need to make.
The levels which I created variants of this sprint.
The main lesson that I learned from our beta test of our build is an easy problem to solve with which we have no time for–our game lacks replayability. When you take a game such as Break By Colors, the endless runner nature of it means that once the wall generation system was programmed, all of the time and effort that would have been afforded for level design could be placed somewhere else. Our game is simply not like that. In order to keep people playing the game, we need a large amount of levels that genuinely make people think. Otherwise, they will feel bored from the game, or feel like they did not have the chance to play enough to fully enjoy the game.
A lot of the level design boils down to the simple concept that you must get enough momentum to propel the package to the end platform. Due to the inability to directly move around the package without the assistance of portals, our game’s level design is limited in many aspects. However, if we were to try and solve this issue, we could simply add different features that would allow for me to design greater complexity into our game. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, we simply do not have time to do this. We might be able to scrape by to implement new features, but it also means I would need to redesign and design new levels around these features when there are already many things that I am preoccupied with, such as the level variants or polish. We would not have much time to get and implement player feedback, either.
Comments
Post a Comment