This week marks to start of my personal favourite part of any project, that being the level design and implementation. I started out by drawing out some levels getting a feel for their individual flow, and an idea for where different ques could be placed, such as audio of visuals effects.
Above are some of the level designs I drew out for the project, and here you can see why I am a designer and not an artist. While they are lacking visual flare these designs do allow me to map out the level and everything within it. As you can see within this design I have littered symbols that represent various aspects of the game, be it puzzles, doors or event triggers.
Drawing out the level designs like this allows to me visualise where I will place the main parts of the project and also where and when I can utilise certain scripts and design techniques. For example where I have drawn out triggers that also mean I can think about how those triggers will play out, one very common tool to use with trigger events is time delays. There are a few reasons to do this, for example, if the player reacts to an event you have to take into account the time it would take a person to react, while this is normally less than a second it is still worth having that half-second delay as that will help to make the event for believable and in term more immersive for the player. This is also known as hysteresis "the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it" to give it its proper definition. Laying out the levels like this allows me to think about design aspects such that this, without also having to worry about certain aspects of the engine, allowing the level to be influenced purely by design and not what's easier to put in the engine at the time.
After drawing out these levels I then have a strong guide for then implementing the level in engine, as that is also what you must remember when putting the level into the engine, these are guild lines. If something doesn't work or you need to move a door or rock because its perfect in the design but makes no sense in the actual level you can do that, early level drawing as meant to played around with and changed.
Here is a very basic and very early screenshot of a level white box from one of my designs, and yes I know the only white part is the snow. This is not a white box in the traditional sense as I have used assets for this, this is purely because I have an assets pack I am using for the project and this allows me to play around with the assets and pick what I want to use from it. However apart from that, the level itself is very empty and basic as you can see, this is because this stage is making sure the level as a whole works in terms of flow and placement of the main features in this case where I will put the puzzles and end of the level.
Here I will show off more of my amazing art skills, with these lovingly drawn lines. This image shows what the intended flow for the level is, to test this I will put someone into the level with just a first-person controller and let them loose in the level. If most people follow the flow I have hopefully laid out I can move on to adding more to the level, if not I will still be at the stage were making big changes to the level will not take a lot of time.
Once the testing is done and the level is in a good state I will be able to move onto implementing more into the level, this will be things such as the puzzles are various points of interaction around the level.
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