Mechropolis – Organic Puzzle Design || Understanding the Machine

When making Mechropolis, it was very important for us to create open-ended challenges that invite to exploration and have a natural presence in the game environment.
So what makes a challenge open ended? For Mechropolis, we defined an open-ended challenge as one that can be solved in several ways, giving the player a new experience each time the game is played.
When working with challenge design for Mechropolis, I found that the best way for me to reach this goal was to […]

Sneaky Ninja – Stealth based level design

This is a short blog post with some of my general thoughts and ideas that I got while designing the levels for Sneaky Ninja. This was the first time I designed levels for a stealth game so I thought I would write down some of the problems I encountered and how I solved them.
When I fist started designing the first level for Sneaky Ninja I was thinking about it like a puzzle game, but I quickly realized this was not […]

Sneaky Ninja – Level Design

The last two weeks have been very stressful, lots of work have been done in order to finish up our game for the beta that was last week and the final presentation on GGC this week. I’ve worked on a lot of features, implementing GUI, creating highlights for all the items and abilities, implementing sound effects and music, as well as doing general tweaking and bug fixing.But the most fun and interesting thing I have been working on are the […]

Lost & Found – A Knytt Story

I made this a while ago for a level design course. We had an assignment where we were tasked with creating a narrative through game environment only, no written words allowed. I made a story about getting lost, loosely based on my own experiences as a curious and absentminded child.
The story can be downloaded here. You’ll need Knytt Stories to play it.

Project “Totemic”

 

Concept art by Nils Wennergren

Theme Park
We’ve been tasked with creating a Game for a course called Theme Park. This involves building a game cabinet and then design original and interesting controls for said cabinet. The games we’ll be creating during this course will be presented at the GGC (Gotland Game Conferance) in Visby, Sweden. Croikey!
Totemic – Our Game
Alright, so we got together, and managed to salvage three people from the last group, Myself (The lead designer), Camilla Jacobsen (The […]

Level Design, Part 2

When we got our new assignment the teachers decided to put everyone in new random groups of two, at first I thought it would be interesting to hopefully get to work together with someone I hadn’t worked with before. But as usual I’m not that fortunate when it comes to getting good group members..
Our assignment was to choose a multiplayer online game and analyze its levels and answer what level are the most popular and why. The first game we […]

University Projects: That Bothersome .txt

Hello everyone, today I’m going to talk about more level design and especially polishing of levels. As our editor cannot load already finished text docs, we need to manage all editing of the levels by hand, by going into text files and changing small, small details such as coordinates.
But to find what I need to edit I need to run the level and playtest the game, find where something is wrong and then enter either photoshop or the editor and […]

Post-Beta – Terminal Game

This Week
This week has been all about polishing, balancing, play-testing and implementing the last promised features of our game. The game is shaping up to be exactly what we set out to do, which gives me that fuzzy feeling of accomplishment, and pride for my group’s accomplishments as well.
The group has been hard at work finishing up the small projects (such as GUI graphics, additional content of the level and graphical errors) that was put on hold in favor of […]

Level Design, Part 1

The first part on our level design course was to alone or in a group of two create a level in the Knytt engine, the purpose of the level was environmental storytelling and therefor no text or introduction was allowed more than the name of the game. I was working together with a programmer and together we came up with a good story (in our opinions). Here is a piece from my report describing some thought throw-out the proses and […]

Music, Game Balancing and Game Design

This Week
The week started of with a Play Testing session, which gave us invaluable information. Since last time Play testing session, we had a couple of points we wanted to show off to the testers, and match their reactions to.
The following points were our most important points we wanted the player to concentrate on:
– Movement
– Colour Scheme
– Sound “Ripples”
– Music
The answers were mixed, but the most interesting feedback (that we actually knew was going to come, as we’ve discussed it […]

Level Design Diary Part 1 (10-12 March)

I’m currently working together with Johan Wittrock on the final assignment in our Level Design course. The assignment is to analyse an level in a certain game, and try to arrive at conclusions to as of why it is the most popular map. Me and Johan choose to analyze Payload maps in Team Fortress 2.¨

So far, by looking at server statistics, we have come to the conclusion that Badwater Basin is the most popular Payload map, followed by Gold Rush. […]

Level Design and Sound Generate Mechanic

Level Design
This week has seen some major changes to the map. We’ve changed the colour scheme, added new areas (which means redrawing A LOT of collision, light and entities). I’ve made some pretty extensive mock-ups on paper, and tried changing walkpaths around in order for the Aesthetic goals the game set out to create, to be fulfilled.
Sooo many Areas have been torn down, rebuilt, just to be torn down again and just scrapped. It’s got to be perfect! Although, this […]