The Level Design of Snapback

Game development is hard. We know this and yet are simultaneously surprised by it’s new bounds of difficulty with each continued step. The most recent step was the challenge uncovered in the last week. After just hitting Alpha play testing (and thus the first real test of players seeing levels for the first time.) The issue quickly arose of a difficult and large first level. While the progression itself was in a pretty straight line, it ended up being too complicated with multiple routes and corridors to choose from.

There were two main issues with this design. One, Play testers were getting stuck in the middle of the level and wouldn't be able to figure out where to head to next. Two, in trying to teach every game mechanic to the player in the first level it became difficult for the player to keep track of all the new concepts introduced.

Another issue that was starting to crop up was level size in general.

Level Two had a lot of open space and was not only starting to bog down the engine but was starting to get boring.

The fix? I revisited designing the level of the game. Instead of creating 3 levels with the first level trying to teach the player every concept in one go, I ditched that design and created 7 much shorter levels. Each is designed to teach the player one mechanic and reinforce mechanics from previous levels as they progress. 

Instead of trying to get 5 minutes of playtime from each level we’re expecting something much more in the range of 1 minute per level. (if the player makes minimal mistakes). 

I also changed the way I was going about assembling these levels. As now 7 of them need to be created and populated with assets in a much shorter amount of time. The way the levels are assembled this time around utilizes Unity prefabs. I created prefab pieces combining multiple of the modular pieces together to create bigger modular segments. I then used those to create 15 modular rooms and hallways that can be arranged together to create the levels moving forward. 

This solves a lot of problems.

I can create levels moving forward a lot easier. 

Each room can be populated and polished individually in the prefab then updated for everywhere else in the project. 

I can rapidly design and make more much smaller levels instead of the few large ones.

All of these design improvements are core to the game design of Snapback. Because of the concept of teleporting before snapping back to the location, the larger levels didn’t fit well with the game play loop. This new design highlights the aspect of game play we actually want, and majorly cuts down on walking time and "non-game play" segments in the levels.