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This level focuses on creating motivating, fun and rewarding level design and mission design with natural tutorial segments in a carefully planned out town layout.
Inspired by: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim (tutorial section), Dragon age: Origins (tutorial sections)
The rough blockout from the previous assignment can be seen in this gif. It gave me a good starting point for the size and approximate layout of the town.
I researched more in depth on medieval town layouts, buildings, as well as looked at game tutorial sections and metrics.
At first, I wanted the objective to stay as an assassination mission. However, I reassessed to strengthen the quality of the level design. So, I changed the objective to a more straight forward delivery mission where I could put more focus on my goals.
I designed the different areas of the town in more detail, elaborating on the character and purpose of each area.
For example, the first iteration of the castle was based on a castle I built in the game Townscaper. While I liked the shape of it, I decided to redesign it for this piece as it was difficult to work with in terms of level design and guiding the player.
Although I initially wanted this to be an open-world experience, I realized that a lot of open-world tutorial sections are closed off and linear and that would fit this experience better.
Making it linear only took a few minor tweaks:
Note: A problem with this design is that the player may get the solution before they find the problem. However, I believe that that is fine since it's in the purpose of teaching the mechanic. Also, if the player is curious and choose to explore they often find the problem first.
Since this is not a combat level I had to make sense of why the player has a bow & arrow and its purpose. Therefore, I added several small puzzles where the player distracts, as well as open gates and shoot down ladders to progress.
The player can also shoot down apples as a fun treat. A future iteration could also have included the ability to shoot signs, lamps or flags as I believe it would've added to the player enjoyment and promoted exploration.
For climbing I added elevation in the level. The elevation had to make sense for a town setting and chose ladders and vines. In order to keep with the linearity of the tutorial, these were the only climbable surfaces.
Parachute is the last mechanic introduced as a way to quickly backtrack to the mainland. This mechanic also required elevation in the level design and thus was introduced last because of the elevation differences in the castle area.
Each district is separated by a bridge or a gate to mark that you're entering a new area.
When designing the town I wanted it to feel like a normal town which the player can come back to after the tutorial level in a hypothetical open-world RPG. This meant that when I made it linear I had to bar off the ordinary paths with things that could hypothetically be "removed" such as closed gates.
Issues - Players either didn’t notice the 2nd bridge in an earlier iteration of the level, or they felt like they should be able to shoot it down from the “wrong” side.
The Ship Captain's reward felt lackluster and not rewarding enough.
Solution - These two issues had the same solution. I introduced the parachute mechanic which sidestepped the 2nd bridge and rewarded the Ship Captain delivery.
Issue – As a non-linear level there was potential that the experience would potentially punish the player unless they did the objectives in a certain order.
Solution – Tweaked the experience to become linear with gear-gating. Made the harbor inaccessible before getting the bow & arrow and make the castle inaccessible before unlocking all the mechanics.
Issues - Upon revisiting this level I realized that after the player is taught the climbing skill, it is not needed again until getting to the harbor.
There was also the potential that the player might attempt to go to the castle after getting the bow & arrow, which they can't get in to.
Solution - To fix this I could block off the path to the fletcher with a gate and then put vines on one side so that the player can get to the fletcher but can't go back to the town square or the castle. It also gives the player a reason to use their newly learned climbing skill.
I am particularly happy about the twists and turns that working on this piece entailed, because I learned a lot about planning my own project and the value of pre-production. This is something I brought with me to my second piece.
I had a lot of fun working on this piece and I wasn’t afraid to get a little silly with it. I am very proud of what I accomplished and happy with how it turned out.
Thank you for taking the time to read! 😊
-Clara
