This is an adventure between a 2d book and a 3d garden, a homecoming adventure story. As this witch, What will you experience?
Setting the direction
Inspired by Mario Odyssey, want to make a 2D+3D game.
I love adventure game, so I choose to make an adventure game.
Case Study
[ 2D Level Analysis: Analysis of Super Mario World ]
The game level design is divided into 2 points: Challenge and Cadence
Challenge:
a small section of tasks surrounded by safe borders that the player must complete in one go. With the basic challenge, the advanced version can be divided into two types of challenge: one that changes the type and one that changes the number. Changing the type means going for a change in the design of some of the levels’ gameplay, and changing the number means taking and increasing the number of levels already designed to be played. When they are combined together, some challenges appear.
Cadence：
All challenges are connected and combined.
[ 3D Level Design: Analysis of Mario Odyssey ]
I analyzed the 3d level using the “violent crack” method
[1] START: Presenting a play in the simplest and safest way for players to learn the principles of the play through intuition and experimentation.
[2] PICK UP: Picking up where the previous instruction left off, constantly upgrading the difficulty and variability of the gameplay to create a game challenge.
[3] TRANSFORM: After the player has grown accustomed to it, introduce another play style or a larger change that breaks through the player’s expectations and continues to create more complex game challenges.
[4] BACK: At the end let the thematic play of the level appear again in its most basic form to punctuate the theme.
This way of thinking can actually improve the rhythm of the level design, though. But it is every detail that ultimately determines the quality: which level design is most appropriate when teaching? What is the most challenging way to play at the higher levels? ……
Game Deign
1. Design：
/Game Design/
In the design of the game, I was always unable to design the most appropriate challenge directly, and it was at this step that the idea of “violent hacking” began to take hold.
If I can’t work out how element A of the play is best taught, then draw all the ways I can think of to teach it on paper and choose on merit.
If I can’t work out how Element A and Element B can be combined to create a great medium difficulty challenge, then draw all the A+B challenges on paper, rate the difficulty and fun and choose on merit.
/Character Design (by me)/
2D Character
3D Character
2. Playtesting：
The sketches on paper provide a great deal of material for the “exhaustive” process of violent hacking, but it is not possible to tell their merits from the drawings alone, as the game is meant to be played and the experience can only be understood if you play it yourself.
Accordingly, as soon as the challenge sketches on paper can be made into playable game prototypes, the selection can be made on merit through trial play experience.
3. Marking：
After implementing all the challenge prototypes in the game engine, each challenge was tried out and scored in terms of genre, difficulty and fun in order to distinguish them from each other. In the case of A Witch Way Home, the challenges were categorised into three types: ‘Action’, ‘Puzzle’ and ‘Walking Simulation’. Action and puzzles are common types of platform jumping games and are well understood, while ‘walking simulation’ refers to levels in A Witch Way Home that are largely non-challenging, with a focus on walking and viewing the scenery, often used to set the mood.
4. Build levels
After sorting and scoring all the challenge prototypes, it was easy to select the best “Play A Tutorials” or “Puzzle A+B Medium Difficulty Challenges”. With the best challenges carefully selected, the final step is to build the levels.
5. Disadvantages
The above approach exhausts the list of possible level designs, which are then selected on merit. Those that are not good enough are discarded. The biggest disadvantage of this approach is that it is “wasteful”.
Player’s Feedback
2022/11/30
After inviting some people to play the game, there is still feedback about the “lack of difficulty”, so we will probably pay more attention to the difficulty of the levels when making the next game.
2022/11/17
The tracking of the monsters for the player is continuous and does not cancel after a certain range. The result is that the player is never able to get rid of the glitch.
2022/11/13
The flow of the level was confusing and players said they didn’t know what they were going to do next.
2022/11/2
After the player has tried out a few levels of the prototype they think there are too many elements and are continually taking in new things with no place to apply old knowledge.
Outcomes
/ Personal aims and objectives /
The change from 2D to 3D gameplay that I wanted to design was largely achieved, and the levels were designed to be somewhat interesting. However, there was still a lot of gameplay that was neutered and many ideas were not shown in the final product. However, overall, it was an attempt to meet expectations.
/ Playthrough of Final Prototype /
In the final version there are still some small bugs that I could not fix. Such as the 2d game where the character has to stand underneath an object to successfully strike it. Like the 3d game where the final boss has some limitations when attacking the player. But we finished with a wonderful garden world, a magical adventure forest. We have combined 2d and 3d very well.
/ Summary of development /
Level design in 3d can be more challenging than in 2d because he has more Y-axis related content. Adventure games are more challenging to design than regular breakout games because they have a relatively higher degree of freedom and demand more from the designer. The designer needs to plan the player’s route perfectly and manage the rhythm of the level so that the player can follow the designer’s ideas while exploring freely.
Overall, because of time constraints, our project did not quite live up to our expectations. There was less variation in the mix of levels and fun. I also wanted to include a lot of environmental narrative related content, but due to time constraints, this was also not completed.
Overall, there is still a lot of room for optimisation in our project.
/Critical reflection/
- Clearly set timelines. During our development process, many features were cancelled due to lack of time. Fun? Completeness? How do you make trade-offs when you don’t have enough time? My answer is that the game flow can be short, but it must be fun at its core and as complete as possible.
- The level design conundrum. Since it was the first time I designed a 3d level, I still encountered a lot of difficulties that I had not envisaged before. The distance the player needs to travel, the time, and the placement of each mini-monster are all crucial, which determines the pace of the level.
- Through the creation of this game, I would like to summarise what needs to be taken into account in level design :
[Objectives]
The player is driven to play the game
- Reward-related goals
To make the game a smoother experience for the player.
This can be obtained by alleviating the player of the less meaningful act of repetitive work and stimulating the player to continue to experience the game in a deeper way in new ways. - Experience-related objectives. It can be the advancement of the game’s plot, in which the player brings themselves into it and wants to explore the story of one of the characters in the world; or it can be the projection of some of the empathy of reality into the game world.
[ Positioning of the level]
The level designer must be clear about the type of level he or she is responsible for.
Different level types have different design goals, and the corresponding design methods will vary.
- Novice levels: teach the player the basic rules of the game and introduce them through key storylines to allow the player to step into the role.
- Tutorial Levels: These are individual tutorials that teach the player the important rules of a particular game.
- Combat levels: levels where the combat experience is the main driver.
So, when planning a combat level, the level designer needs to find out the answer to the question “In what way is our level intended to meet which needs?
Any other elements that would detract from the experience need to be cut back as much as possible. This is to make the experience as pure as possible.