This week we got some very good criticism on our latest build. We had a great discussion on our level design and mechanics, some of the ideas that we introduced was we should expand the first level since it was too small and simple. It would be very helpful for new players to have more space in the tutorial level to get used to the flight mechanics and avoiding the asteroids. We also talked about having a dummy enemy to introduce new players to the enemies and help them work on aiming. We also talked about ways we can improve our game such as adding items that would enhance the player and creating these asteroids that have bits/containers of lore inside.
After that meeting on Tuesday, I was tasked with expanding the level so that it would be longer, along with adding more to the tutorial. What I decided to do was double the size of the current level so that it would be around 6-7 minutes to complete instead of the 3-3:30 minutes it would take currently. I think that having around 7 minutes per level would be pretty good, of course, this does not take into account speed runners but I guess that's a different set of players. Anyways, I added an open debris section after you complete the first part of the tutorial, completely removing the enemies. That way, the player can first focus on honing the controls so they are not overwhelmed when first playing. I also added a giant "capsule" which is covered with rocks that the player has to shoot in order to get in and out. This capsule is what is containing the package, so the player is forced to figure out the way in. Luckily the player should recognize the rocks since they broke the same rock at the beginning of the tutorial. Once the player gets the package, they can move onto the second part of the tutorial where they have to shoot a dummy enemy and kill it before moving on with the level. Once that is done, the rest of the level is very similar to the way it was in the previous build. Overall, I would say this took me around 3-4 hours to do since I needed to place all of the debris and test the level to make sure that there were no bugs that are obvious.
Comments