William Baran - Week 7 Devlog

Total Time:  ~10 hours

Level Design:

After meeting with the team, I got some good feedback on Level 2 and the overall feel for it. I decided to keep room 1 as is, redesign room 2 from the ground up, and take elements from room 3 that we enjoyed and repurpose them. I kept the concept of a central point and made it so that players would have to launch themselves in the air and use fans to dictate which side they went into. While working on this room, I hit a design block for a while. I wasn't really feeling the rooms I was designing and felt like it was a little bland. After taking some breaks and going back to it, I decided the best way to go about it was to dive into the fan theme. Since the level is based on the lungs, the mechanics of the fans were going to be essential. I decided to begin making a key to refer back to for the mechanics of the fans. I laid out what the states of the fan were based on the gizmos used. These states are: on, off, low, medium, high. Next, I drew out what interactions the fan had with the player and other things in the levels. The fan can be used to push the player side to side, or elevate them up and down. The fan was also capable of moving objects like platforms or movable boxes. Finally, I added a new mechanic to interact with the fans, a turbine of sorts. If the fan blew into it, it would activate something else in the level. This could be turning on a laser, opening a door, etc. After creating the key, I went back to designing. I resketched the room and added these mechanics to it. While I still don't think it's perfect, I think having the mechanics listed in front of me to refer back to was a big help in designing a better thought-out level.

Playtest Report:

I was also tasked with working on playtests this week. We are still trying to think of ways to playtest before levels are in the engine. We've thought of remaking levels on paper and cutting out the characters, gizmos, and mechanics so that it's a simple and easy visual for the players. Placing the characters and moving things around as needed. The other method was to control the players for them in Photoshop or another program and then just have the players tell us what they wanted to do. The latter is not as ideal to do since it's not as engaging for the players.

So while we still work and brainstorm what to do for that, I went ahead and made the form for players to fill out after they playtest. It has some questions regarding the game and their overall enjoyment of playing it. Our goal is to keep a fun and engaging playthrough for both players, so we need to make sure we are keeping on that track.