DESIGN RULES, BASIC LEVEL DESIGN DRAFTS & LISTS UPON LISTS OF STUFF NEEDED TO MAKE THIS BLASTED THING.
Originally, the game was meant to be called Shadow Shard, and was based as a stealth game inspired mostly off of Thief & Bloodborne. I had planned on starting it up earlier on in the academic course, but didn’t find the time out of class to do so. Instead, the project remained cemented in my mind.
A 2d stealth game, where the player used a bow as their main tool. They could not fight effectively, being too weak to do so. Only the amount of arrows and types of arrows at their disposition could provide aid in combat, alongside the Shadow Shard, which was an item that allowed them to turn invisible, dash through shadows, etc.
The issue was the following: it would have been easier to make a game that correlated with my final thesis project, so that any research I did for the essay would also count towards my FMP, and help me better understand my final project.
As a result of this, I chose to fully incorporate Environmental Storytelling into my FMP, rather than be a simple stealth game replica, I would go about making a 2D platformer that would tell a story through the setting alone. Something that would allow the player to still make use of those stealth mechanics I’ve been trying to implement in.
I give you the Silent City instead: a 2d stealth exploration game, where the focus is to find a mythical item using clues left behind in the environment. The player will explore a dangerous, half flooded ruin, hoping to find the solution to their village’s incoming destruction. Its essentially the same concept, however the focus will be entirely on level design. Death itself won’t be a crucial part of the game, however the way the world is set up, and its navigation will be. In that sense, I’ve decided to examine two games that I believe execute levels/dungeons rather well.
Hollow Knight & The Legend of Zelda are both excellent examples of branching level design, making use of various rules and a rich environment to also give birth to interesting challenges and environmental narrative. My main research was through Game Maker’s Toolkit’s video essay series on Stealth, Level Design, World Design and Environmental Storytelling, where Mark Brown critically analyses various games, namely those I’ve previous mentionned.
As of now, I’ve begun a rather basic GDD for the game itself, going to detail the final project’s recipe, the story behind the game’s ruin, inspirations and basic player movement. I’ve also drafted some basic world design, based on the temple I seek to create. Here’s an early sketch of it:
Finally, in addition to this early draft, I’ve come up with some level design rules that will guide my process through the project, using what I’ve learned and read from various books and video essays.
Arthur’s Level Design Rules: * Keep it simple stupid, each room should have a challenge. * Every room must be unique enough to warrant its own existence. * Every room must be connected to at least 2 other rooms. * Connections between rooms can be before/after acquiring a key item. * Every room must be thematically and narratively evocative, as well as relevant to the game’s environmental storytelling. * ‘Logic’ between rooms must naturally pursue to the other. (I.E: If there’s a waterfall, where does the water go?) * Every room needs to be kept in a simple, but cohesive artstyle. There’s no need to overly complicate your life. * Every room should have elements that can help facilitate stealth gameplay, and freedom of movement.
LEVEL DESIGN * PLAYTESTING * THE SILENT CITY
Much of the past week has been drafting levels and dividing each room according to the 8 rules detailed previously, as well as implementing them into the game itself. Alot of the level itself has been done with the intent to tutorialise the player into understanding the fundamental mechanics of the game:
Moving
Jumping
Crouching
Pushing objects around
Shooting the crossbow
Using ropes and rope arrows to maneuver through the level, etc.
As of now, half the level has been drafted. Alongside the grayboxing, which is meant to have exploration as ready as possible, I have made a list of things that need to be added to increase a player’s understanding of what is happening across the world.
A corpse will be placed at the entrance of the stealth section. A corpse will be placed at the location of the crossbow. Wooden surfaces are found with rope arrows already embedded inside them, additionally, the sun gem will be available from this corpse, but nothing allows the player to head back up, forcing them to go through the small gauntlet to learn how to use ropes and then acquire the rope arrows.
After receiving feedback from tutors and playtesters, some areas have been changed, notably the rope arrow test room, which focuses more on learning how to properly climb up and down ropes, as well as understanding that one can only spawn ropes when shooting at wooden surfaces with rope arrows.
Rope arrows can only spawn ropes if the arrow strikes wooden surfaces.
The previous layout of this room section taught about ledge climbing more than it did about rope arrows, which needed to be changed. (I encountered a problem where the player did not inherit the velocity of the rope swing, which will have to be fixed soon).
Update: It has been fixed! Much of the movement is now perfected, all that needs to be looked into are walking animations and jumping animations. But I can finally move onto level design properly as well as enemy creation. Acquiring the crossbow early on means I will have to initiate the player to its utility, thus I’ve placed a placeholder enemy that will attack the player and is blocking the way forwards.
“Bright Green Circles” are dubbed Sentry Eye Golems, which will build up an attack against the player and shoot them if they do not hide or move out of the way quickly enough.
The player now jumps off of ledges and ropes, meaning it allows for a more fluid and less drastic transition from ledge hangs to jumping, all I require now is to establish a jumping animation and walking animation and the player character itself will be complete.
After which, I will have to establish health bars (likely 3 hits before dying), and HUD for the quiver of arrows. All of which is being worked on as we speak, apologies for the long, distant lack of diary logs beforehand.
Sprucing things up, and adding features.
Its been a while since I’ve posted a development diary log, and well… I sort of need to seeing as its part of the process. A lot of things have been implemented since the last post (albeit shakily).
Amongst these things are: pixel art sprite models, a journal to track down journal entries about the world, particle effects (rain) and backgrounds. Most of the feedback given was to make things clearer, to cut down on the level’s content until I can develop it post-hand in. For now, I deem it important to bank on the use of rope arrows to further emphasise how crucial they are to the game.
I can’t help but be disatisfied with the lack of content here, compared to my Bachelor’s final project where I had multiple levels for the player to go through, I only have one here, which is rather weak to showcase compared to previous masters. (Who knew attempting to design a metroidvania was difficult?)
For now, the ideal concept is to get a level that gives the player sufficient challenges to get through, alongside platforming and rope challenges, to put things into context. My thesis was on environmental storytelling and worldbuilding, which banks alot on graphical storytelling – a thing I am unique inept at. Additionally, I originally wished to make a metroidvania or stealth-like game, but I feel like I might have spent too much time idling, or overdesigning things.
Here is how the game has evolved so far:
Now, the only thing left is the main door, which when interacted with will end the game and bring the player to an end of level screen, likely with a “still under construction” placement, I’ll have to see. I fear I’ve dreamed too big.
The key feature implemented here was the journal itself. It functions off a very crude function that merely increments an integer, depending on the integer, it allows the display of certain entries, but I think I would have to find a more adaptable variant, as if someone misses even a single ‘exposition point’, then their journal remains incomplete, yes, but also out of synch: which is a problem I’ll have to find a solution to later (as in after submission).
What else… mostly practical, quality of life, improvements. The game has a hut which shows the health bar, arrows, available arrows and available journal entries. I’ll see if I can get some feedback about the whole thing, and perhaps change the healthbar to something like hearts instead.
Completing the base game. Part 4.
So, 4th and before last development diary. The base game is ‘complete’ so to speak. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. When you arrive at the door, you can press [E] to enter the Silent City, which really should have been the start of the game. But I would rather have had something that tutorialised the game’s mechanics, and then use this to build further on it.
This big door here is your access to the temple.
So, all this to say we now have a functionning level with plenty of obstacles and other forms of platforming challenges. I don’t feel like this was really a vertical slice of anything in particular, but more so a prototype of what Silent City could be. Naturally there are further coding issues, such as using the journal icon to open the bloody journal rather than having to press [J], and then again the menu for the journal should be able to be used both with keyboard inputs and mouse, however it’s a bit too late for that.
A friend of mine gave me access to a video of his playthrough which provided some crucial feedback, as well as additionnal hints on how to better my jump, which I’ll be adding once submissions is done. The first step is to provide a functionnal game that ATTEMPTS at my original goal:
Playtest feedback for the Silent City
I’ve fixed the issue with the dots staying in place once one has shot all their arrows, as well as tweaked some of the camera motions to be less harsh and more upwards oriented. AKA: you can now see more content rather than a pitch black void below you taking up half the screen. I have also audio and music by Kevin MacLeod for ambience, as well as generic ambient music.
So, on to what needs to be done:
Add better jumping;
Make some smaller improvements, like the HUD button.
Here are some further images on the various improvements done to the Silent City:
Part 5: Case Studies & Attempts at Nostalgia.
Last one, then critical analysis, wooh!
I figured I would have to come around to case studies eventually, seeing as my previous logs were completely swamped with notes of my progress. These dev logs have more so me swimming back to the surface of whatever murky mire of mechanics I had going on at the time. Despite this, I still plan on finishing this game after hand-ins, as its essentially the game I’ve always wanted to make, barring a classic J-RPG with intricate storytelling, characters, etc.
“La-Mulana has you exploring vast ruins sprawling with puzzles and monsters, […] the solution to the former residing in interpreting the clues left behind by civilizations beyond human comprehension.”
So, first case study: La-Mulana, (2012 Remastered Edition) is an exploration-metroidvania game where the player takes on the role of an archeologist who delves into the titular ruins of La-Mulana. La-Mulana has you exploring vast ruins sprawling with puzzles and monsters, the solution to the former residing in interpreting the clues left behind by civilizations beyond human comprehension. The game has you reading tablets to understand lore left behind by previous civilizations, as well as fighting back hordes of monsters that hold no greater purpose but to stiffle your continuous glorious progress deeper into these nonsensical ruins.
The great thing about La-Mulana is that it completely emulates how an adventurer-archaeologist would feel, to our eyes. No digging in the ground here, nor sir. We put ourselves in the shoes of previous peoples and try to understand the concepts and morals by which they were guided, all the while solving puzzles that pertain specifically to these civilizations. The Giants, the ‘2nd children’ have a different term for “SKY” than the ‘4th children’. And none of this is extra lore, knowing what terms mean what is crucial to progressing through the game, as well as solving the puzzles throughout the ruins.
I wished to emulate this sort of feeling, by creating the sense of ancient ruins and having some kind of log book wherein the player could investigate certain left over ‘landmarks’, and then have these landmarks written down in said journal for later use. Sadly, they’re mostly fluff and less crucial to gameplay than the rest of the game’s mechanics.
Thief: The Dark Project is one of my favorite games that excells in creating an aura of weakness and skill through its barebones combat married to its excellent stealth system.
Second case study: Thief the Dark Project (1998) is the grandfather of first person stealth games, the likes of Dishonored and pretty much every ‘stealth’ section you’ve had to play in contemporary first person games. You play as Garrett, a master thief whose sole reason for doing what he does best is so he can pay rent. Sadly for Garrett, and thankfully for us, he gets roped up into a city-scale conflict between two insane factions: one that wants to use a magical artifact to resurrect an ancient deity and return the City to nature (thereby brutally murdering everyone inside), and a zealous group of technology worshipping crusaders that oppose the former.
Thief excells as a stealth game because of its soundscape and sheer level of detail taken into consideration and how it uses sound, line of sight, surface textures and lightning to create the perfect skulking simulator. I had planned on originally making a stealth game for the sake of exploring these mechanics, but thought I did not have sufficient skill, and that it would take some time before I eventually got there. Thus I chose to use it as a case study at first, then as I worked on the game, I would apply stealth-based sections.
Thief has the player make use of various tools and arrows to get through the intricate and detailed levels of each… well level of the game. Water arrows to extinguish fires. Moss arrows to pad sound. Rope arrows to get to higher positions, etc. I sought to use this mechanic and apply it to the game here, however have only gone so far as the rope arrows for now.
Hollow Knight is a bug-based metroidvania that banks on its gorgeous art design, and world design to bring the player into an unknown and beautiful landscape.
Third case study: Hollow Knight (2018) is one of the most acclaimed and rewarded metroidvania games of this current generation, with a sprawling diverse world filled to the brim with intricate world building and environmental storytelling details, it becomes mind boggling. When one considers all this was made by a team of 2-4 people, and the sheer size of Hallownest (that’s the world you explore in this Metroidvania), its rather mind blowing.
That said, I took much from Hollow Knight for the basic concepts and design of the Silent City, namely some world design rules I observed and detailed in Dev Log 2, which are the rules I plan on sticking by as I go on working on this project. I also took the jump from Hollow Knight, and tried my best with the graphics to convey some kind of greater world as you can see in the screenshot above. Sadly, I don’t think I’ve properly achieved this, as my graphical skills are somewhat lacking.