Introduction Hey all, I'm Jonathan Allen, a student studying Level Design at Michigan State University. Today I will be discussing the design process that went into "Paragon." The game went through many iterations and ideas before the team eventually settled on making a 3D First Person Platformer with an explorable overworld. The team and I discussed what movement options we wanted, deciding to keep things relatively simple by giving the player a relatively high jump, the ability to sprint, and the ability to slide. Keeping these simple mechanics in mind, I decided to build linear obstacle courses that test the player's mastery of these skills. I was also responsible for creating and implementing the game's narrative. From a narrative perspective, we decided to make these levels a form of "VR test chambers" that the protagonist needs to overcome. This is why the levels have a very Tron-like aesthetic to them. Inspirations Early in development I decided to seek out some games that would help spark some ideas as to how to build out these levels. One game that immediately came to mind as soon as I started building the levels were the secret levels found in "Super Mario Sunshine." I thought looking at how these levels were constructed would be a good place to look as they are very similar to the levels I wanted to create. They are similar in the sense that they are linear 3D platforming challenges suspended over a dangerous bottomless pit, with the major difference being the player's point of view. Another inspiration that I drew ended up looking into was "Portal." Seeing as the levels in that game consists of many test chambers that have evolving thematic elements, I wanted to try and incorporate similar ideas into my own design. Level Prototyping Before building out the levels I drew out very basic versions of them on paper to iterate on and get my ides for each level in place before I started constructing them. My process consisted of drawing out a very simple overhead view of the level and then writing down the type of obstacles I wanted to create in each room. I then created more detailed maps in Adobe Illustrator with more fleshed out elements. Originally I wanted to have each of the 3 main levels to individually focus on testing the player's main 3 abilities being jumping, sliding, and sprinting. I thought that making each level have a primary focus on one of the abilities would make them stand out in a thematic way. However, after some tests I realized the levels would be rather dull without incorporating the player's full arsenal so I decided to change my focus on making the obstacles visually distinct in the way they move. This way each level would have a distinct theme to help them stand out from one another. The first level focuses on all forms of rotating blocks, the second level's primary focus is blocks that move back and forth while the third level has a mix of both as well as introducing brand new blocks that squash and stretch. Design Philosophy In the very first level of the game which doubles as the tutorial, I wanted to make 3 very distinct sections that teach the player about all of their movement options in a safe environment and then end it with a short test combining all of the abilities in a more dangerous environment. There is also a NPC that provides tutorials spread throughout the level if the player needs the extra help. I also wanted to use these distinct sections as a way to subtly tell the player what the color of each block means, blue being a platform the player can jump on, purple being a dangerous death block that kills the player, and green being a block the player needs to slide under. These colors are consistent in the entire game. Within the main levels, I wanted to challenge myself to create 3 unique obstacles and sections in all of them providing the player with a wide variety of challenge. Let's dive into the second main level to show what I mean by that. The first section of level 2 starts the player in front of a bunch of moving death blocks down a linear hallway. I ensured that the death blocks moved back and forth fast enough so that the player will not simply be able to walk past them forcing the player to use the sprint to proceed. I did this as early as the first death block so that if sprinting wasn't an immediately obvious solution to the player then the punishment wouldn't be too brutal as they are already at the beginning of the level. I continuously expand on this obstacle up until one final challenge in this hallway with 4 death blocks moving in a rubber band like motion that the player needs to pass. After this challenge the player needs to get past some fast moving thin death blocks hovering over a dangerous bottomless pit across several bridges. This is a short section but it's also when the main goal of the level becomes visible, the tower. This tower is the host to the final challenge of the level where the player needs to ascend across platforms that move up and down while avoiding more moving death blocks that continuously get faster as you climb up. All of the obstacles throughout this level are unique in nature but all share the same element of continuously moving back and forth. This is an attempt to make the level more memorable than if it simply had 3 completely unrelated obstacles. Every level in Paragon uses a similar design philosophy in an effort to make them stand out from each other. Problems and Resolutions A common aspect that crops up when developing any video game is that you will run into issues. It's just an inevitable part of the development process no matter what. Paragon was no stranger to having several issues during its development. Making blocks move: I knew from the beginning of development I wanted to make the blocks throughout the levels move in several different ways. I originally looked into programming scripts that affect their transform but couldn't quite get them to move the way I wanted to. After asking one of the team's programmers for some help in the matter and after we both looked into the issue we eventually decided that using unity's built-in animator was the perfect solution to my problem. The animator allows to you freely animate the transform and scale of individual game objects so that they could all be perfectly hand crafted to do what I needed them all to do. With this solution, I didn't need to write a script to get the blocks moving the way I wanted to. Iterating the movement: A common problem that many of our playtesters had was that the movement was originally way too fast for the average player and the the mouse sensitivity was way too high. I originally wanted the movement to feel extremely quick to encourage speed running but it seemed like most players felt that it was nearly uncontrollable. I decided to adjust the player's movement values to a speed that felt more comfortable but still quick. This shift in controls caused me to need to adjust elements from several of the levels but it was all worth it in the end to make a much more player friendly game. Making item's "disappear": This goes more into the narrative design side of my contributions to this game but I just wanted to mention it because I find it funny. In the overworld sections of the game there are several quest items that the player needs to pick up to progress but I couldn't figure how to make the item's destroy themselves upon being picked up. However I did figure out how to make the object's transform change upon clicking it. So I decided to simply change all of the quest object's transform on the Y-axis to a number ridiculously high upon being clicked giving the illusion that the player picked up the item. It's a pretty janky fix but one that works that I found to be pretty funny. Final Takeaways
This was a very educational development process, I feel like I learned a lot about not only level design but the entire game development process as a whole. I just wanted to quickly go in depth about a few things I learned while working on this game.
Thanks for reading about the development process of Paragon, I hope to continue learning how to build 3D levels and improve on my level design skills. If you have any interest in playing Paragon there is a link to the gamejolt page on the games section of my website.
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