Side Scroller: A slight change of plans

At the start of the fourth week of the project we looked at our current game as a whole. Up to this point we'd been whiteboxing and then moving on to creating an alpha version of the game with first pass assets and basic textures in order to test the flow and gameplay of the level. 

 We'd reached the alpha stage and were in the process of working out where to go from there; some gameplay elements weren't working and some areas were too sparse. After the tutor feedback which was mostly that the level wasn't full enough and some parts weren't terribly interesting to play the tutors realised that the scale we'd been given was actually a little too big. Perhaps because of the very small amount of art direction we'd recieved at the start of the game been delayed in the early concepting stages as we got caught up in trying to work out the overall style and look of the game. 

Not having a level blockout also meant that we'd had to design the gameplay ourselves; something that we'd never had to do before and therefore took quite a long time going back and forth between design and engine in order to get a level that was traversable and contained gameplay elements.
At this point it was decided that rather than making the full level each level would pick about a third of their level for them to build up to benchmark level whilst the rest would be kept at alpha stage. We decided, since our level has quite a few items that are repeated around the level, that we would bring the top half of the level up to the final standard. A couple of assets would be moved as they'd already made them and wanted to showcase them (The prayer wheels were originally going to be in the lower cave but were moved into the upper part so they'd be part of the benchmarked scene.

The original level

The reduced level; these parts would be benchmarked and the 'blockout' parts would stay at alpha level

This change allowed us to work on a denser looking level that wouldn't feel so empty however a huge challenge at this stage was still making the game entertaining. Our tutors encouraged us to make the gameplay entertaining which had been a consistent challenge since we have no level designers on our teams. Though it was interesting to create such a different style of game the time frame and the scale meant there were times when it was easy to feel out of my depth when it came to designing game play and only having two engine artists creating the four levels limited us a little.

If this project was to be done again, then it'd be nice to collaborate with other areas of the university; other departments concentrate on programming and designing levels and a joint project with people who have a more diverse set of skills could really produce an amazing final product.