So you might have seen this week, but I decided to have a crack at some level designing prototyping earlier this week. And hooooo boy am I a bit rusty! Turns out you kinda need to keep working at this kind of thing to stay in practice. And I have 100% not been staying in practice.
To be honest, it’s probably been a good seven or eight months since I last did any proper, in-engine game design. So it’s been a bit of a slow road back to getting anywhere near anything pretty.
For anyone who missed it (follow me on Twitter! @kipslife) here’s the screenshot I posted:
Turns out it’s pretty handy that our primary aesthetic is based around squares, cos my standard design seems to be pretty boxy anyway…
I tend to start with a simple set of rooms and work out how the player will move from one to the next. In this case, the player needs to stand on the yellow button in the centre of the screen. The passive projector at the bottom of the screen (the blue box) will then project them up and into the second room at the top of the screen. From that point the player can choose to go left or right to proceed.
Eventually they will have to cover both sides, but I’m trying to set it up so that it doesn’t matter which they choose to do first.
This is still quite bare bones at the moment, so I’ll try to finish it up over the next week and do a bit more of a deep dive into the design and build process next week (or over the next couple of weeks).
In other news, I’ve been working away at uni stuff as well over the past few weeks, and now I’m gonna give you the chance to see the last essay I did! (Try to keep the cheering to a dull roar please).
I had an assignment to do a self-reflection, examining a video game and my relationship to that game, using some psycho-dynamic theories. And the essay was to be presented as a video essay.
This assignment was a bunch of fun to do (which makes it a change from a standard essay) and I was pushed to really probe into how I felt about the game I examined and why.
I chose to examine Night in the Woods, a game I played earlier this year and really enjoyed.
This was quite a bit of work, so I doubt I’m going to be pumping these out (I have plenty on my plate already thanks) but if people like it I might have a go at doing a couple more of these at some point.
Anyway, that’s all from me, check out the video below to see why I liked Night in the Woods…