Game’s Progression (Level design and Atmosphere)

As I want to specialise in Level Designing I knew that I wanted to approach the level designing for this prototype in a professional manner and knew that I wanted to incorporate professional practices within my work from now on.

So for this level before I even jumped into Unity, I did multiple sketch ups of what the map layout would be. After looking multiple professional level designers works they all stated that this was a really beneficial tool to use before creating a level . By doing this sketch up I was able to clearly create what the layout of the map would be and was able to see the direction the player would take through the level. The main benefit I found with doing these sketch-ups was that it was very time efficient in the sense that I could produce multiple sketch-ups and it didn’t matter if I made a mistake or if I wanted to change something, I could simply rub out this area of the sketch and redraw in the new path. This also allowed me to have a vision/direction to take my level in before jumping into engine.

I have become aware of the importance of blockouts over the course of this year and was able to see the benefits of this, when I incorporated blockouts into my previous GAM701 Project ‘System Error’ and after seeing the effect this had on the quality of my work knew that I needed to introduce this into all of my work. With this project I spent the majority of my time developing my game in the blockout state, really polishing up how the player reacted with the environment, how the AI reacted with the environment and most importantly how the player progressed through the game and the feeling/pacing the game had. By doing a blockout this enabled me to test all these features with the added benefit of easily being able to change things around as there wasn’t any detail put into the game yet, allowing me to create a more polished game.

By incorporating these professional techniques into my work I was able to see more clearly what a level designer does and the importance of their work. By using these techniques I was able to produce a higher quality and more professional prototype/game, but most importantly these techniques changed/improved my approach to developing a game/level.

Atmospheric with music in game:

Said in my last prototype that I wanted to get more involved in the process of making an atmospheric game. The way I wanted to approach this was to create my own music into my game/prototype as music plays a huge role in creating atmospheres in games. I did this by creating my music in Garageband and transferring it over to Unity, I had to think about the pacing of the game and the atmosphere that I wanted to create with the music that I was creating. With the three pieces that I create, I created an intense piece of music for my main menu, a slow paced piece with my main game background music trying to create the feeling of action and of Santa coming back to his home to find it taken over and that he’s gonna take out the trash (a bit cheesy I know). The final piece (for the winning scene), I just wanted to create the jollies music I could with a hint of Christmas (which is why I included shakers and tambourines into the piece. )

#Santa039sRevenge