Level Design Proccess
A few Weeks into the production of our project I was shifted to the level design pipeline which lead to me producing a tutorial level with the intention of teaching the player basic gameplay mechanics like wall jumping and world obstacles. I also decided at the end to add a segment for showing off the weapon shooting and cog boxes as we couldn't fully utilize them in time due to late changes and shifts in focus.
Some screenshots are shown below that show the final level with some gameplay elements thrown in:
This video shows my level being played from start to finish including the dialogue and the sounds used.
Design Phase
In order to begin designing the level I first needed to create a design philosophy that I could stick to while I developed the level and iterated on the design choices I was making.
The first Philosophy that came to mind was nintendo's "Kishotenketsu" style. through some digging I found an article that references an interview gamasutra had with super mario 3d land director koichi hayashida.
In short, the information I gathered was that the technique has a key theme of "Introduction, development, twist and wrap-up".
inx 1.
The technique "originated in chinese poetry, but was adopted by japanese and korean writing" - Phillips, 2015. It tough the topic of how "In four sections you can introduce a topic, develop it, give it an unexpected twist, then bring it to a conclusion" - Phillips, 2015
These quotations were the bread and butter of my philosophy moving forward as I began to produce pre-production
Bibliography
Inx 1. Phillips, T. (2015). Nintendo’s ‘kishōtenketsu’ Mario level design philosophy explained. Eurogamer.net. [online] 17 Mar. Available at: https://www.eurogamer.net/how-nintendos-best-mario-levels-were-structured-using-chinese-poetry [Accessed 11 Apr. 2023].