Week 4 - Creating a level blueprint - 16/2/15

This week we were told to expand on our original game concept and develop a blueprint for a level that was to be included in the game. As per last week, we were given a series of questions to help aid our design. All of these question will consist mainly of hand drawn images with an explanation on some of these images.

Week 4 – Creating the level blueprint

Question 1: Building on the original concept developed in Chapter 2, create a blueprint for your level. Make sure you begin with a series of rough sketches until your blueprint begins to take shape.

Image 1: A rough map of the level with a few notes regarding its design.

Image 2: The level with more detail added to its design.

Image 3: The final level blueprint and with start position and notes included.

Question 2: Create at least three gameplay mechanics for your level. How do these objectives relate to your original story idea?

There are many different gameplay mechanics that are Included when making games. Some of these include what style the game is, how the player interacts with the game world, right up to how the characters move and interact in the world. As the game is a RPG style, and the player assumes the role of a sergeant in an army, he has the ability to aim, shoot, jump etc. He will also be able to interact with other minor characters in the game world, like talking to AI characters throughout the game, and interacting with objects around each level.

Objectives throughout the game will have different ways of being completed. Some will include killing a certain character/a number of characters, gathering intel, picking up certain objects, triggering a set of events or cut-scene and checkpoint which will load another set of objectives to complete the level. In this level that has been conceptualized above, some gameplay mechanics that have been created are gather/pickup objectives for most of the objectives in the level, where the player will have to gather information by going from house to house to interview people and find out information. The player will also have to use Jump/climbing and crouching movement mechanics to make it through the level as the end objectives are isolated by an obstacle. The player will also view the game through a first-person camera mechanic, as most shooter games are created in first person to make the game feel much more realistic.

All these game mechanics relate to the original story idea of a RPG shooter game as these are all integral mechanics into making a game like this work. The jumping and crouching mechanics in the game are necessary as the jumping is needed to navigate through certain levels and over obstacles, while crouching and lying prone are needed to hide in cover from enemies firing at the player and crawl under certain obstacles. The gather/pickup objectives can be used for many different instances throughout the game and not just the level, where the character may need to retrieve a certain item/weapon, or gather a certain piece of information. These are important as they give another way to complete objectives, rather than just to kill someone/a certain amount of people. The first-person camera is probably the ideal way to play a shooter game as it depicts the story from the point of view of the character and player, and this makes the game more relatable for humans to play.

Question 3: Come up with five level objectives that correspond to your gameplay mechanics. How will you identify these objectives in your blueprint level?

Before the level begins a cut-scene will show telling the player the main objectives of the level, which would be a different character telling the main player to go and gather information by interviewing the locals living in the houses in the surrounding area. There will be four pieces of information to gather in this fashion, and they should be collected in a linear fashion as the player follows the ‘Z’ shape of the level. The final objective of the level is to take the information back to head command, which means navigating back through the level and returning to the starting point.

These will be shown in the game by a text line that appears in a corner of the game screen showing the current objective and how many pieces of information are left to collect, if applicable. In the blueprint level they will be shown via a blue cross (X). The final objective is shown via a red cross (X). If there is an arrow beside the cross it depicts that the objective is on the level above.

Image 4: The final level with objectives included in the design.

In the next lesson we will be given two keywords which will be the themes for two games we are to create.