Hot under the collar…

by William Terlop

The last few weeks has been more level design. It’s a lot more difficult than I expected. It’s not just about item placement like I thought. When I was meeting the the games producer, a few suggestions came up that I didn’t really expect. I took these things for granted. A few of the things that were brought up were:

• What kinds of ambient sounds do we hear in this level?

• What kinds of animations bring this factory to life?

• How will the player feel engaged while in this level?

Things that I took for granted in the games I played now were really important in the one I was making. Another thing I brought up to the producers was how my character felt while traversing the levels. No no, not Sid’s emotional state… but how he controlled. Did the player feel in control when making these jumps? The answer at this stage is no. Good controls make or break a game. I really needed to fix this but how? How could I tune this perfectly? The wise producers had an answer to this too! “Play the kind of game you are making!” Wow… such brilliant advice! Just boot up some of my favorite games, ones that inspired me. So I did. Ratchet and Clank on the PS4 was the one I booted up for this experiment. I immediately got a nice feel for what kinds of controls to tweak and implement.

Thats been my task this week, it hasn’t been easy and it is actually a ton more work than I expected. I have always respected game designers but this made me realize how much detail goes into this kind of design. I’m currently also tweaking various aspects of the game. Sometime I get lost tweaking everything, but that will all come in the polish stage. Well… I’d better get back to it. I have more lava bubbling sounds I need to scrape from the internet!