#1 - Level Design, Combat, and Art Assets

Hi :)

So right now I have a few sections to work on, which I' doing simultaneously. The two which I'll be doing for the next forever are designing the levels and creating art assets. Then a current problem which should be resolved in the near future is the fundamentals of combat, from where a new forever section of creating enemies and bosses will sprout.

I wanted to work on combat today because I really think I should have it complete before working on the level design, as the levels will include enemies. I might be shooting myself in the foot when I come up with cool platforming ideas, if I'm not also thinking about how I could integrate combat to make it better. 

To resolve this (and help with other things which I'll explain in a bit), I'll be trying to follow a general plan for how to go about designing levels. The goal here is to free me from being bogged down in the minutiae. But some specifics are relevant such that changing your mind on them later might require a lot of work to rebuild the rest of the system around them. 

So how do we distinguish between relevant and non-relevant specifics?

• Obviously adding certain mechanics would break the existing system, e.g. giving the player a double jump would nullify a lot of the platforming challenges. But, giving the player a gun wouldn't influence platforming challenges. So we're looking for mechanics that influence the existing work. But the problem is, it can be hard to define exhaustively all of the mechanics, since there's so much going on. 
• The other addition would be changes of degree; making the player faster, jump higher, etc. These can require changes in degree of the existing system, for example, being able to jump farther means you'll have to move the landing platform farther away. This can run into issues if you're restrained in some way, thus requiring a change in kind, e.g. if the size of your levels is static, you can only move the landing platform so far. Another more relevant example for my case is if the platform is also used by another section of the room, and the relative positions of those two sections in relation to another section must be fixed.

So what are the elements of the general plan?

• I'll be making use of the idea of general ‘concepts' for level design elements, without worrying at this moment about the specifics. For example, I had the idea to utilise the ability to shoot the grapple into the ground and push upwards to create interesting platforming challenges. And I did create a few designs with this concept. But, these won't be the only designs I create, nor should they be the final ones I go with. This has a few benefits;
  • It gives me a useful framework, wherein make as many designs as I can think of within this concept, both in itself, and in relation to other concepts. 
  • It resolves my problem from before if I consider each enemy as a concept. Since I can simply think, for each permutation of concepts, what interesting integrations they could have with each enemy.
  • It will allow me to structure good curves;
    • For difficulty since I can tweak the specifics later to change the difficulty.
    • .For variation, since I can restrict and spread the concepts as I desire
      • I want to set some restrictions on the set of concepts in each level, and spread among levels, for narrative reasons. I think it will add to the cohesion of levels in themselves and distinction between levels if they stick to a number of core concepts, which are used in that level and rarely (if ever) used again. And there should also be concepts which are constant across levels if they result in interesting integrations with level-specific concepts. A problem here would be that two level-specific concepts from different levels might have interesting integrations, which would never be utilised since they're in different levels. I don't know how to resolve this right now.
• I won't be designing the levels in order. This has a few benefits;
  • I won't have to worry about difficulty balance just yet, which might cause me to throw out a good idea, of spend too much time worrying about the minutiae required to create a nice difficulty curve.
  • It allows me to structure my thoughts in terms of concepts, rather than levels, which has the benefits explained above.
• I don't want to worry about the visuals right now. The benefits;
  • It will allow me to design levels out of order easily, since otherwise I'd have to either create all of the assets for a level before designing, or creating all the assets in all levels, before being able to design non-linearly.
  • It will give me more time to work on designing levels, since I won't have to wait until I'm finished the art.

This sure was a strange first log :)