Personal Development Project - Blog Entry 7

Improving user experience

I got feedback from users who thought my rope swing was too complicated because the logo doesn’t appear on the viewport and only at the swing location for the rope swing.

To fix this I just made it so that the rope swing logo appears on the player screen as well as the swing location so that the player is constantly aware.

Adding basic music

In order to get a feel for the flow of the gameplay I decided to add some royalty free music into the game. I found a good, thematically synergistic track to play in the background of the game.

This is a link to the audio file I downloaded from user jammerboy70:

https://freesound.org/people/jammerboy70/sounds/398640/

I imported the audio into audacity and cut it down, then exported it into a WAV format.

Second level design

For the creation of my second level design I was able to make it way more complicated and fun than the base tutorial level. This allowed me opportunities to mix and match certain mechanics you learn individually in the first level and expand upon them and how they interplay in the next level.

In the first session I managed to come up with a series of free running combinations that complimented each other and challenged me. It required a lot of tweaking and moving the objects so that there was a good flow between the mechanics.

Continuing level design

For the next section of the level I realised that I needed to add more complex systems to the game in order to make it more engaging and difficult, but also to add variety to the level.

To start I added a turret into the level in order to make use of the players weapon. On top of this I added a section that would require that player to chain wall runs together.

After the turret I needed to communicate to the player that they need to turn around, however I found a way to do it that fit the theme of the game, on the wall I added a text widget that simply warns the player to “turn back” a harsh warning from inside the mainframe, that acts as a prompt for the player to turn around and see the correct path they must take.

Another thing I added was moving hazard walls in numerous places that move along a timeline attached to a spline.

This allowed the level to have a greater sense of danger and pace to it and added a complexity to the level that was previously not there before these were added.

Finishing the level design

To finish the level I wanted to do something unique from the rest of the level that combines all of the learned skills throughout.

I had the idea to implement an old concept I had for a free-running game into this one, in a truncated way.

Known as “the tower”, this small section would combine all the learned skills and test the player as they have to try and climb the tower, to add extra depth I added a hazard wall that constantly moves down the tower on a loop, meaning the player must time their ascent perfectly.