Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Level Design: A pirate's bounty

Here is the level setup for my level platformer.

The game is designed to be an underground game, a game of pirates. It is a pirate treasure hunting game where player must overcome obstacles in order to reach the treasure at the end of the game. It features two levels of enemies, spike traps, and wall clings in order to climb. It begins easy and teaches the player how to maneuver through the world via text box notifications as they encounter new experiences. It would be cast in either a ghostly blue or an eerie brown coloration, tying in to the underground theme with subtle shades of gold to tie in the theme of piracy and treasure.The main story idea is a pirate discovers a treasure map and once he begins digging, he discovers its the catacombs of a dead treasure pirate named blackhorn. Blackhorn was rumored to have a treasure filled vault that would make any pirate drool, but it is heavily booby trapped. The tutorial would go over the basics of movement, jumps, and using the grapple tool to move throughout the map.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Game Analysis: Tutorial of a Metriod (Super Metriod)

In the nature of a platform, i found this to be a good example of one. It has many platforms and includes several jumps and flips to reach them. In this tutorial level itself, they are witnessed almost immediately. Playing the game on an emulator, the experience was different than that of the experience I remembered on the old SNES console.

The level is a logical and straightforward. Each encounter is broken up by a door and features uniquely different appearing rooms. The variation in platform height and room space allows players to jump and learn the limits of the movement system.



The game does not provide a formal tutorial in the sense it walks the player through how to use the game, but allows the player to learn the game themselves. The logical flow of the first half of the game is slow, there is no direct combat which is perfect in order to learn movement and how to fire the main weapon.



 The level climaxes in a boss battle, which challenges a player to survive as a large dragon-like pirate flies and attacks the player.

This provides the largest obstacle for the player to overcome as they fight to survive the encounter.
As the boss character flees, a timer appears and informs the player that the ship the player is on is in self destruct mode and they have a certain amount of time to escape. It introduces the player to time limits as well as shaking game- screen. As the player moves backwards to where they start, the ships color changes from cool blues to emergency reds and the screen begins to sway side to side, providing an extra obstacle for players as they try to escape.

The game moves from a non-difficult play to a challenging play, as the boss-enemy slashes the player health below 30% and adds obstacles as the previously easy path has now become a dangerous one. The player receives more negative feedback than positive, if the player dies in either the boss fight or the escape sequence, they are returned to the start of the mission. It is heavily story-based, as the player's encounter in this base was elaborated on within the opening cinematic of the game. The boss battle is related to the events of the cinematic as this ship was the location of the last metriod, which is now in the stolen possession of the pirates.