Level Design Projects

This level was designed to be an obstacle course where the player needs to get a certain amount of coins before arriving at the goal, as the levels made by the developers for this event had that same format. The level is divided into three parts that are formed by each of the three rooms, connected into two halls.

The level is designed with two core ideas in mind:

1. Two diverging routes on the top and the bottom.

This allows players to make a decision on where they prefer to go through. The upper routes are more narrow and challenging but the number of coins they can get is higher, and lower routes have more space to go through but have less coins.

2. Presenting the player with different challenges individually and then combining them to create a different more difficult challenge.

The level presents two main core challenges: the flaming spinning devices and the elemental reaction plates, which are combined in various ways throughout the level to keep the player thinking of new ways to overcome the obstacles with the knowledge they’ve gained in previous challenges.

This game jam game has the main mechanic of having to return to the start of the level by flying across it after having finished it. For the three levels we made we decided that this mechanic would be a challenge for the last two levels, and let the first level be a tutorial with not much challenge on this mechanic’s part.

For the first level, the tutorial, I wanted for it to be able to teach the players all the core mechanics of the game with as little text as possible, so the level has easy obstacles to overcome where the player needs to execute a specific mechanic in order to progress the level. For example: having some platforms where the player needs to jump across to continue.

Some signs are put every first time a new mechanic is introduced, showing the player the button and which action the character does when that button is pressed by showcasing a picture of the character performing the action.

For the second and third level we wanted for each one to have a differential mechanic. For the second level we implemented a mushroom on which the player can jump on to gain more height than with a normal jump. We played with that and spiky vines that served as obstacles to the player both to finish the level and to go back to the start of it.