About me and my role

Hi my name is Abraham Ohlsson. I have studied video game development for Five years, mainly focusing my efforts towards UI- and level design.

In “Rhythm, Paper, Scissors” my role is that of a level designer and scrum master. The personal goal that I have set is to hone my skills in guiding the player in a subtle way so that he/she always knows where to go without feeling like the game is ”holding hands” too much.

Level design I wanted to do

My main goal was that to create levels in which I would guide the player and make sure that he/she wouldn’t get confused along the way. Our game is built in a way that the player first faces a tutorial before a randomly generated tier of levels that utilizes the things taught to the player in this tutorial. My task is to create three tutorials, in which the player should be taught how to play the game and how to find the goal. I intended for the levels to guide the player with its layout, objects and enemy placements. But I needed to change my this mindset and adjust the way I was gonna work for this project.

Here is a example the base layout I hade in mind:

Level design I gonna do

I will create several room that make up a level. Instead of making one single level where I guide the player. I need to guide the player both within the current room as well as in the labyrinth of rooms that together creates the level. This will be accomplished by using diffrent type of doors, enemys and objects in the diffrent rooms.

Here is an example of a linear room progression layout:

What I want to learn from this project

Under this project I want to learn how a player act and when playing a top down video game. This will give me the tools to improve my future level design and get a better understanding of what makes a level have a good flow. My personal opinion is that if a player gets stuck for too long in one place in a game it is most likely the level designs fault and that can be a huge problem.

I am going to arrange three playtests in which my levels will be tested. The first one is next week. I will watch the playtesters as they play through my levels. Their sessions will be set on a timer so that I can measure how long it takes for them to make it all the way through. At this point in time I don’t have a set amount of playtesters, but I would be happy with ten. But I try to get as many people to test my levels.

The levels that I’m going to create will introduce new game mechanics as well as new enemies.

What I have done so far

As I’m writing this RPS is barely in its infancy. There’s plenty of work to do and I’m excited to learn more about this part of level design. Let’s see how far I’ve come when I write my second post here in about a week.