Project Blade, Day 8

Today was the day we decided on which rooms to bring into production.

There were plenty of discussing between all of us designers as to which rooms me and my fellow level designer should bring before our level- and environmental artists. We where supposed to cut them down from fourteen rooms to ten, but only managed to cut it down to twelve. The inability to cut down two additional ones was due to all of the levels still having their strengths and we didn’t want to keep them waiting for too long.
Once we had our meeting with the artists, we managed to combine a few rooms into more interesting ones, which had positive results. Along with that, they helped us greatly in reducing the number of rooms we had resulting in us being left with the six rooms we had originally planned for. However, there were rooms that they still liked and wanted to keep on the backburner for if we add more rooms in the future.

Additionally, the fifth room by my level designer comrade was combined with elements from my third room, adding small gardens to it as obstacles to empower the ranged enemies a bit whilst also enhancing the calm feeling of the room.

My fifth room was also revised to not feature the intended bar theme and instead proceeding with it being a workspace with an interesting layout. This was fine by me though, as I went into designing my levels with the mindspace of letting the decorations be left to the artists to decide. I wanted to mostly stick to what would work best for the gameplay rather than how it should look.

The reasons for the chosen rooms being chosen was to have a good spread of various rooms, with three workspaces, two relaxing rooms and one sort-of in-between space room. This in-between space was my fellow designers sixth room, featuring lots of corridors. They said that they designed the room with tight spaces in mind to challange the player by limiting their mobility. But through a few revisions, the room is now a bit more open with more pathways, whilst still retaining the enclosed nature of corridors.

The more relaxing rooms chosen were my first room and my fellow designers fifth room merged with my third. The reasoning behind my first room was that the middle piece could very easily be replaced with a statue of sorts, making the whole room feel more like a place of appreciation for the enemy’s leader. As for the fifth room, the room was already very calm and relaxing featuring a centerpiece made for relaxation. But the room felt too open as it was, and expanding the centerpiece would just limit the players mobility further. So instead we opted for adding the small gardens of my third room into their fifth room to make it less empty whilst only limiting the players mobility slightly.

For the workspaces we chose my fifth and sixth rooms and the other designers third room. Starting with the latter, the third room was chosen due to already being designed as a workspace, namely a conference room.
My two rooms were chosen, however, due to their layout being more intriguing than the other options and could easily feature a couple of workspaces, tables and so forth. But as previously stated, my fifth room was redesigned for this purpose.

Moving away from the choice of rooms, I have also been further researching Holistic Level Design via a GDC by Steve Lee. The video is very informative and has really helped me get a greater understanding of level design as a whole. I have also begun revising the levels which were scrapped to enhance them in-case we want more levels further down the line.

With that ends this day, which I personally felt was very productive even though not much was done. Mostly because a pretty big matter was settled with the room layouts and now we wait for our level- and environmental artists to create a tileset to use in the rooms.