The Triangle Level

For this week, I've been hard at work on the next level for Goldblitz, which hopefully will be our first real level in the game. The idea came to mind with a triangle that's fairly symmetrical, with a lot of power ups that players will get to pick up along the way.

There are three gold nodes (marked with the black circles) in the corners of the triangle. Players start in the middle of the map, giving them an equal chance to get to each gold node in the map. Between each node are the power ups in a fairly straight path. They give players the chance to stock up between the nodes.

The level is also divided into tiers, two nodes are at the highest tier while the last node is at the lowest tier. The middle tier is where the players start and is the largest, offering the most power ups as well as some obstacles for players to smash into.

The level is very large and gives players a lot of room to explore. I took what I learned from the last few levels made about size and power up placement and put them into effect with this level. It's my hope that players in the QA lab this week enjoy this map.

Next week I'll be working on an updated King of the Hill style map with adds another tower and a bridge to connect them.

Week Two: Tower

After the first few rounds of QA last week, I think I've discovered the perfect balance for level designing in terms of the level size.

Many of the players claimed that they didn't know where to go or didn't enjoy the much larger levels. This probably didn't help with the fact that there weren't many structures overhead that could direct players for guidelines. That's when I was given the idea by our lead designer to create a king of the hill level.

The idea is to have a map where players know where to go instantly, and will fight each other once at their destination.

This level still needs to be tested, as there were some doubts from other team members about the placement of certain objects. I believe that this will be the most fun level yet.

New Semester

Here we are at the start of another semester and on a new team! For the Spring semester, I've been assigned to work on the game Goldblitz, a racing game based around combat and mining.

Specifically, I'm going to be the one working on the levels in the game. The leaders, Rob and Jesston, have said that the level particularly need a lot of work and they wish to have 3-4 by the end of the semester in 12 weeks.

This shouldn't be too hard to do, I'll have to work a lot with the environmental artist, but I'm confident in my abilities to complete this task.

Right now, they don't have much to go on for levels, including what size they should be. My first task this week is to set the standard for level sizes to ensure future levels won't seem too big or small. I'll be white-boxing out levels this weekend and testing them next week.

Final Seminar

I have to say that the final seminar we went to was pretty interesting, if a little long winded with the questions or comments from my other classmates. Not that I found the topic boring at all, in fact I find it very interesting, it's just I feel we got way too sidetracked halfway through and lingered on subjects (like Mass Effect 3) for longer than we had to.

Going back to the main topic of transmedia, I feel it's something I'm deeply interested in because of a side project I've been hard at work on all semester. Check out my blog for it here (http://masqueradestory.blogspot.com/)

Masquerade is both a card game and book set in the same world that I wanted to publish and sell together.

In fact, pretty soon I'll be launching the Kickstarter for it. The world of Masquerade is set in a land of kings and assassins. The story revolves around a sinister plot to kill the king of the kingdom. In the game, players fight with the many different characters who appear in the book to either kill the king or protect him. In the novel, readers follows the darkest distances of the plot as they see that there is more to this masquerade than meets the eye.

The idea was to see how will two different medias could support each other. Based on our seminar though, I feel like it's certainly possible for Masquerade to be a success. I may be able to even expand on the medias and create a community as was suggested in the presentation.

Final Presentations

As of last night, the final presentations are done and I must say they were a blast to watch. Compared to last year's projects, the ones this year are really well designed and refined.

My hope is that at least 8-9 teams go forward, since there were so many good groups. During the presentations I took the time to look at which teams needed a level designer since I had been working on our team's levels in the game most of the semester.

I don't want to say here which teams I really want to join up with and go forward, but they definitely had the stronger presentations during the night I'd say.

My favorite one so far was Crisis of the Superverse which left the audience on a cliffhanger and made them want to see more. That kind of tactic is something to consider when challenging again.

End Game

So we didn't end up passing to the final presentation. To be honest though, I'm totally fine with that. You can probably call this post a pre-post mortem.

I learned a lot on this project about dealing with different team members with different ideas of what is fun. For example, in the beginning of the year all of us had a unique way of thinking that we had to combine together to create a single idea we could all agree on. In fact, we didn't come together until about three weeks into the semester. So lesson learned, these things take time.

Another big challenge we faced was communication. Now, I faced communication issues in groups before, specifically my Production 1 group, but this proved to me that communication issues can exist even if the team is speaking with each other. Our group simply didn't talk about what we were working on even though we met constantly and had the means to talk to each other instantly.

I'm sure you'll be hearing all about the post mortem stuff later, so I won't go into detail here. This experience, however, certainly taught me a lot about groups.

Passing Stage 2

Perhaps the biggest threat to our project is finally behind us, this week we learned that we had passed stage 2 and are no officially prepared to move onto the final presentation. You can bet that the final presentation itself is going to be the major focus for us this next week.

Sadly that means that Thanksgiving break isn't really going to be much of a break for us, I'll be hard at work focusing on the documentation for the Design Bible. There isn't much that can be said for that, unfortunately. I'll be trying to keep the writing simple and consistent so that anyone who would be to join our team can understand the game instantly.

As such, I've organized the table of contents into less than a dozen categories that I feel will cover all the important topics. AJ will be handling the marketing information while I'll write the systems and everything else.

The other thing I plan on doing before the final presentation is working on the presentation level. Since it went over so well in our Stage 2 Presentation, we figured we'd present our entire game to the class through a carefully designed level.

This will work out for us as well, since we can easily alter the levels we make to suit the final version of the game.

There are still some bugs in the game that need to get fixed, so I'll probably have to get on Steve for that.

We're all eager to go forward and are grateful for the short breather we're having before the final presentation.