Levels

Here are some of the levels we created the next semester. A lot of them were based on levels I had previously created but had not put in the game. I went back and standardized all the aspect ratios, wall widths, rounded corners and just polished them off.

Interestingly, these walls were created with the intention that the player would have a constant velocity, and would just swipe up or down, left or right to move. Hence the pac-man maze type feel of these levels.

When thinking about this more, however, we realized a shooter where the player was shooting down mazes was not very interesting, and took away a lot of the aiming skill we wanted to exploit in this game. We probably should have prototyped it, but moved away from the concept anyway, and gave the player a free ranging movement without constant velocity.

Unfortunately we didn't change the level design to reflect this mechanic change until very late in development. People were having a lot of the problems with the controls throughout most of development. Most of them would voluntarily put the game down after 3 or 4 levels. They mentioned that the shapes were hard to control, and it was clear they weren't having fun with the game. Even though a lot of them thought the concept was intirguing. There were probably many factors that led to this, but I think one of the biggest factors was the level design.

People were having a hard time chasing down the shapes, and navigating around the mazes, and through the corridors. Add to the fact that the triangle moved faster than the other shapes, it made it even more difficult for the player to achieve their goal in each level.

Finally a few weeks before we were to present we posted new levels. I wanted to have the first 10 levels have no walls at all so the player could focus on controlling and learning the mechanics and the target shapes. The rest of the levels were then very simple. Here are the old levels.