Skip to main content

2D Side Scroller : Tutorial Levels


SO YOU GOTTA BOAST ABOUT IT!

Getting the player to learn how to play your game is one of those challenges that every game designer faces. I decided to attempt to use the subtle method of giving the player no choice but to do the action and implying through affordance and context what to do without telling them what to do. For example at the beginning of the game the player spawns on the left against a wall. It follows then that they must move right. The player then falls into a pit. They must use the jump key to escape, then into another pit, same deal as the first except now they cant directly jump out as they have a jump off of the raised block because the wall is 3 blocks high. This teaches the player their limits without simply telling them. The pits are also just too long to jump over so a player cant accidentally miss this lesson.


Next, the player enters a room where the ceiling slopes down nearly to the floor heavily implying crouching and affording them a small space to move through. Once the player drops into the next section they are stuck unless they try walking against the box. This teaches them that they can push boxes and quickly follows it up with a season in pushing a box to stand on it to reach a high place.


My hope is that my game wordlessly communicates its ideas and teaches the player all the ways it expects them to act. The player shouldn't ever get to stage and feel completely lost as to what to do. I also did things like keeping every level start and end a the same height as this helps orient the player and reinforces the directional progress they are making.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Barbican

Enemy at the Gate The Barbican estate in London features a lot of the style of architecture that I wanted to emulate in the art and design project, so for this project, I'm going to try to create my own barbican estate using the real one as the palette. To do this I'm going to create concept art using the barbican as part of a reference sandwich to create unique architecture that should both be evocative of contemporary London, retrofuturist and contain elements meant to subtly guide the player through the area to their goal.
Post a Comment
Read more

2D Side Scroller : The Final Idea

When the rubber meets the road. The Panda here represents  Covid-19 During the course of recent events, it became clear to me that my time was somewhat limited in this project. As a result, I have elected to go with my first idea, the Dung beetle puzzle game. This should provide me with a decent opportunity to stretch myself in the implementation and iteration of mechanically without requiring nearly as much in terms of asset creation which for this project at least isn't one of the marking criteria anyway.  The Dung Beetle Puzzle Game is changing slightly to just a puzzle game but keeping the core idea of pushing a large ball around as its main mechanic. So the player characters job is to get the ball to its goal and then make their way to the exit of the stage. This gives me a solid and simple foundation to build some hopefully cool puzzles off of without bogging me down in extra systems, which if you refer to my previous ideas was rampant. Even when stating that I have eyes...
Post a Comment
Read more

Technical tutorials : Maya

Modular Corridor Part 2 Using the pieces I made last week, I duplicated and then arranged them into a labyrinth-like structure by moving the anchor point to a corner then using snap to point to align the pieces. For the sections that didn't quite meet, I selected the vertexes of one face and snapped them to the connection point of the piece I wanted to connect to, effectively making bespoke pieces. This was very easy and relatively quick to assemble a complex structure. Using this workflow would enable me to create large spaces in a very short amount of time. 
Post a Comment
Read more