Designing levels

Hello everyone!

The game I wrote about in my last post is making good progress. In fact, it is almost done! Past few weeks I've been working on the levels. By this I mean the placement of the level 'blocks', enemies, pickups and triggers. Also creating specific sky settings and atmospheres per level to make it all a bit more interesting to look at.

The above image is a kind of schematical representation of a piece of level. It shows the environment shape and several boxes. Those boxes are used to bring the game alive.
The big red box is the so called 'Trigger'. This tells the game to run a specific pre defined event. The smaller green boxes are 'Spawners'. Those are positions of where enemies and enemy vehicles can be spawned. The brownish/crate like boxes are used to place pickups, such as new weapons etc. The event which is being triggered by a 'Trigger' tells the game at which spawnpoint it needs to spawn what kind of enemy or enemy vehicle. These events are written in text files.

The hard part of creating all of those levels is the balance. The first set of levels should be easy enough for everyone to get into the game. But at the same time challenging enough to keep even advanced players interested. The last thing we want is players who quit playing because there is a lack of challenge in the beginning.

The same goes for the final set of levels. These are obviously a lot harder to finish than the first ones. It is also important to reward the player for his or her efforts. This is done by giving the player special weapons and pickups at specific moments in the game.

Another sneak preview screenshot:

Make sure to keep in touch with our facebook page for the latest updates!

- Joep