Hello!
We are excited to post our first proper Dev Blog and give the community a glimpse of how the sausage is made. This news post is a shortened version of the latest Half Past Yellow blog post, which can be read in full here: https://halfpastyellow.com/blog/2024/10/30/Level-Design-in-Tempest-Tower.html
Learning from our previous game
An important aspect of the Tempest Tower project is our ability to move quickly with ideas. Because of this, the decision was made early on to use a similar camera angle and movement style to our previous game, Time on Frog Island. Making this decision early allowed us to come into the project with some basic level design rules and a good understanding of how traversal should feel.
Key level design tenets from ToFI:
- The island gains height/verticality the further ‘north’ that the player travels
- All designed/expected jumps in the game are possible with about 1 meter of leeway (the game is not built to be a hardcore platformer)
- It is always clear when the player needs to jump (exposed rock visuals)
- The camera angle makes height differences in the geometry are difficult to parse so take off points for ‘1-way jumps’ should be marked clearly
- If the player is ever completely obscured by terrain (which was used sparingly), the ground should be completely smooth and require no jumps to pass through
Blocking out a level
While we are lucky to be starting with so much knowledge from Time on Frog Island. It was still necessary to find the fun within Tempest Tower. The rules above gave us a good place to start, but we had to be fast at creating new levels so we could properly test different gameplay features. Blockouting a level always went through three stages of focus; player movement, enemy paths, gameplay objects/items.
The base terrain is built up by connecting and overlapping pre-built platform pieces in order to create flat open areas, terraced hillsides, and connecting slopes. Pre-built rock shapes are used to plug holes, block jumps, and add visual variety to the space. We are using a world space triplanar shader for both the ground material as well as the exposed rock material so that we can guarantee that the terrain textures always line up. This does generate quite a bit of overlapping geometry, which we might need to revisit at a later date, but it isn’t currently a performance problem.
Enemies cannot jump or drop off ledges (for now), so platforming areas act as shortcuts between different sections of the level. We always build levels with a player movement focus first as it has the largest impact on the fun factor of a level. Levels can often feel a little bare at this point, but understanding how the player moves around a level is important to understand before moving onto the next step.
Once we have a good first pass on the overall level, the focus shifts to building enemy paths. A level in Tempest Tower needs to feel amazing (and ideally different) to traverse during the Building Phase and the Action Phase. The route(s) that enemies take through the level can greatly affect the flow of the space, tight corridors become impassable while high cliffs can be more easily reached. Because of this, we are still making big changes to the base terrain while we decide how to weave enemy paths through it.
The final piece of the blockouting puzzle is the setup of game objects and items. These are gameplay relevant elements that the player can interact with and use during the level, (things like resource spawners, bombs, destructible blockers, etc.). Once added, the level is properly playable, and the designer can start to evaluate, refine and balance (which is where the real fun begins).
Read more on our website!
If you enjoyed learning a bit about how we design levels for Tempest Tower, then you can continue this Dev Blog on our website.
The post goes on to describe some early gameplay failures and how changes to the game design impacted the types of levels that we created.