Level Design Research

To get a proper view of what my game is actually meant to be, it's important to make a concise two sentence paragraph to detail what my game is and what you do, for my game this is as you can see below.

"A 2D story game about a man fighting a monster inside a radio station. Interact with the environment and learn about the character, station and monster if you want to survive the night."

Another thing the website recommends doing is making a top down image of the level. This doesn't really work for me as I'm making a 2D game, what does work is a side view of the rooms of the map so that I can make the final room sprites more efficiently and without missing anything.

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The next thing to do if I want an effective level, is map out where things happen, sort of the progression of the game. In my case, the player will encounter voice boxes and things like progression points. The need for landmarks isn't really here, the rooms will all look different but things like the sofa and windows will really set them apart.

Designing challenges is a key part of games. The only games without major challenges to the player are ones with amazing stories, and even those have some challenge in the form of interactions that keep the player entertained. The main challenge in my game should be killing the monster at the end.

Other than that, some challenge comes from interpreting the story through the speech events and environment.

Another way to keep players interested is by offering rewards for playing, this doesn't need to be a constant thing and can just be scattered around the level. It helps to give a sense of purpose to the player. The reward for adventuring in my game is getting speech events to learn the story.

visual references are a lot more helpful than you'd think, but since I'm working alone and not in a team, I don't really think this matters. I'll still make an effort to make mood boards and such though as it can help to keep me on track and stop my ideas from changing.

Sharing with my team would also be good if I had one, I can still make use of this sort of peer feedback system by having my peers unrelated to the project give me their views and opinions on how my work is looking and how I could improve.