Grinding Out Some Maps
Source: Photo by greg. Mélow: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-skating-on-skate-park-15026079/
This Week in Game Development
I’m still working on The Last Humble Bee!
As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, I’ve been greyboxing levels. In The Last Humble Bee, maps contain 25 “rooms”, set up along a 5x5 grid. The player can navigate these rooms like an old “Legend of Zelda” game, in top-down style.
As of now, I have the 8 “middle rooms” greyboxed. Each room acts as a sort of “playground” that the player can navigate and play the game; however, the rooms don’t “look” playable, which would be challenging for any playtesters. The room layouts makes sense to me, since I’m the developer, but if I want to get useful feedback, I need to process the background artwork so that the space is more navigable.
In hindsight, picking an art-style that was less “involved” with post-processing FX would have allowed earlier playtesting and faster level design. But I think the art-style I chose looks unique and serves the story.
Speaking of “serving the story”, I watched an eye-opening GDC talk by Jeremy Bernstein called “Creating Strong Video Game Characters”. This taught me a lot about creating likeable, interesting characters that serve as “partners” to the player as they progress through the story together. This talk is definitely worth watching (or re-watching on my end), and has already impacted a few game elements (ie, changing ‘hunting for treasure’ to ‘finding the obelisks’) to better suit my narrative.
I’m excited to see how it all comes together! I think with my style of game (ie, the genre, etc.), the goal will be for my game to get some traction based on the re-playability of the demo. Making a polished demo will be an important milestone, and I’ll need to watch the “median playtimes” to tweak the game and improve it’s performance as development progresses. But for now, I’m sprinting to get the map flushed out to get to a solid playtesting phase.
-Jacob
Links:
Creating Strong Video Game Characters by Jeremy Bernstein
Six type of best selling games by Chris Zukowski