About Internship
Some details about my first workplace experience.
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Half a year, full time.
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Contribution, full time Level Designer part Game Designer.
What I learned
Thanks too Meelfoy Games was I able to have a fun and experience-rich internship. Which in return made me more inspired to fully commit towards my own growth and future. Notes taken from the internship,
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Information sharing. If you need help make sure to be precise with the problem to save time for both parties.
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Game Design planning, workflow, documenting, testing and finalizing / presenting the feature.
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Level Design, carefully planning for the week and working together with the team for a efficient/healthy work tempo.
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Documentation (PP, Excel, GD) bug report/ feature/level values making sure it's on point of what needs to be in the spotlight.
My Intern experience
Getting the opportunity to dive deep into the RPG, Puzzle genre, experimenting and mastering fun yet challenging levels. Had to work towards a goal of keeping the levels ready for release, this indicates, playtesting and creating tons of unique levels and remaking levels to better fit the long term goals. Thinking about the players and even making changes based on team/player feedback.
What I did as Level Designer
The objective for my time as an intern, finalizing the 100 levels required for the launch. Playtest, feedback existing levels. Did they feel worth keeping or where they in need of rework based on a list of level requirements. Where my duty to decide and find what levels needed changes and find a suitable change within a decided time limit. If a level was in need of changes that was approached carefully planning the size of potential changes. The goal would always be smaller change the better for more efficient time investment. After changes levels would be tested and potential feedback would be taken into action, repeating until the level reached a good state.
The bricks
The levels are built with bricks and they function differently. Every brick has it's pros and cons for removal. When going into creating a level, making sure there is a flow with the brick types and that they have a purpose behind every placement. The bricks themselves are holding the hero platform so making sure they stand strong and witstand the physics of the game is what makes a good player experience. This can be done using the design philosophy "Risky or Safe" bricks.
Boxed in bricks have very high impact on bricks above causing large collapse.
Risky / Safe Bricks
What decides how risky or safe a brick is? Basically the chain reaction of brick movement in the tower after removal of a brick. By being able to spot "safe" or "Risky" bricks the levels can more easily be adjusted. This was used to make sure levels was at a good difficulty, by having a constant increase in risky picks over the game while keeping majority of the bricks "safe".
Boxed in bricks have low to no impact on towers stability.
Color Design
One of the most effective ways to communicate with the players, color patterns. By having certain pattern you can effectively make it more clear for the player what color is potentially risky or less risky. This changes over the course of a playthrough since the tower moves but after playtesting sometimes the safe starting color could end up being a bad. By having patterns it greatly rewards players for stratergizing while also needing certain adaptation in choices after the tower have moved.
By clearly splitting the colors into sections it makes decision making simple for the player. As an example for this level blue is a safe color and red is very risky.
Tower Stability
The most important task for the quality of the playthrough experience. The game has built in physics, making the tower able to collapse when bricks move. As a level designer I wanted to be able to control the towers stability. This was done with brick placements, some bricks where more efficient at adding strength than others at certain parts of the tower. Having a well rounded weight in the tower, so around the same sized bricks both at the top and bottom. When levels played well but felt unstable it was solved with grey bricks. They are bricks that don't move and act as a free reinforcement tool for the player at certain parts of the tower.
Design unique levels
While having to work on tons of levels there was one task that stood out. Making them unique, a lot of experimenting was done to find a optimal solution but most of them fell short. What ended up being the key too achieving uniqueness was as previously mentioned color design but also grey bricks and empty brick slots. Those 3 all fullfill gameplay purposes while also endlessly giving potential for new and fresh esthetics.