Mockery in the Black
First Main Level Design
At the beginning of making Mockery in the Black, I was tasked with making test scenes for our games mechanics. But after my team was given the go-ahead, I talked with my team about how our level layout should look. Together we came up with a rough outline of spots and their order of events.
I then took those outlines and went to making our prototype level, the top image being the whole level together and the bottom image being the section I made as the end puzzle section that I created alone as we hadn't discussed a puzzle or layout in mind at the time.
The primary point of this level was just to get all our mechanics into a level that would show them off and show off their ability to be engaging within the game space and introduce the mechanics and produce a horror atmosphere.
There popped up some issues in professor feedback and playtests I ran with the player's ability to understand where they were going due to the dark and similar nature of the level. The feeling of things being straight and forward was an issue as well, which both I would note for the future when I talked with some of my team later.
Level Revisions
Based on the prior feedback from both professors and playtesters, I sat with a tech member of my team as we discussed possible ideas to expand the level and create more clarity and engagement. We discussed some ideas, like clearing up some of the level (see top image to the right) to add more. But I feel that none of this would solve the level's ability to create clear landmarks and points of interest/goals efficiently. I decided the best course of action was to scrap the whole level and remake it after discussing it with a design professor on how best to proceed with a new level layout.
I did expand and added more to the old level due to the need to turn it in for a milestone, but I tried to reduce the lost feeling players had by bending some of the lamps and adding more visual clues like cables being connected to switches.
But I then switched my focus, I talked with the design professor, and he helped me create the new puzzle section layout as seen to the right. The idea being the player has different paths to go down to solve puzzles and such to open up the ending section for them to escape through., but at the same time, both lights, elevation, and objects in the distance serve as guiding entities of where to go and their goals. I also kept the idea of bent and broken lamps to help point the player in directions as well.
I also sat in with tech as I worked so that I could both ask for help on implementation of tech into the level as well as being able to ask for changes or reworks of current tech features. This led me to be able to place down checkpoints properly and specific encounters with our monster without the player getting soft locked or just having to deal with it the whole time.
Changes and Goals
Some changes done would show to the left, here I decided on implementing a section in which when the player flips a switch, they see how the switch affects the rest of the level and can see both the goal they want to reach as well as new paths that have opened up after they performed their action.
This goal is to help with player clarity; now that the player is above the central plaza, they can see what has happened and where they need to go where they couldn't have gone before. This has helped a lot versus the prior level, which was mostly a flat plain leading to the player not knowing what they did or where to go.
Some issues with this, though, would first off be the render distance being reduced. Due to some performance issues, the render distance on lights had to be reduced, and thus some of the player's actions can't be noticed from the hill. This, along with both a lack of some more feedback in the player's interaction with the switch and the amount of space some objects take on the screen, runs the risk of covering up the player's ability to notice these changes.
But I am aware of these issues and hope to be able to talk and work with the team to fix these possible issues and redesign a new level that avoids these issues.
Puzzels and Landmarks
In the new level, I was able to create more space for a puzzle. But due to both not having much time to work on the level in-depth and not having much experience with puzzle design at the moment. I asked one of my design teammates to design a puzzle idea and outline that I could then integrate into the level.
They gave me an idea for a light puzzle, solved through the correct order of flipped switches nearby. I took this idea and integrated it into the other half of the level, but using prior ideas of elevation and showing the player their effects and goals, I put the switches on a ledge overlooking the puzzle to show their effects and help them solve the puzzle, but also keeping the end goal landmark within foggy sight of the player so that they know that beyond this puzzle is the path they need to take.
But again, this is somewhat hampered by the field of view being blocked a bit by the boxes, which I fixed by spreading the boxes apart so the player could look past them. And the reduced rendering of lights somewhat blurred the landmarks and turned off some lights.