Level Design and Environments

Good evening,

I am Alexis, a level designer, environment artist, and project manager on this fun project.

This week, our team started implementing and planning out all the levels, focusing on their difficulty and how to teach players the rules and mechanics of our game. Some of our interactions and meshes are not fully functional yet and will take time to complete. However, this doesn't mean we can't plan out where they will be. We created prefabs of simple objects with notes correlating to what is supposed to be there. This way, we can still playtest a bit and get a feel for the flow of the level. It also makes it much easier to simply right-click and replace our old prefabs with the new ones.

To visually fill out the world better, we decided to create modular environments. These environments are designed like city blocks, giving them a bit of personality. We initially planned for this to be a continuous game but preferred hand-crafted levels for better control over our level design. Instead of manually placing everything, we can simply switch out each city block for another one. If we want to create more variants of these blocks, we can swap out the buildings or objects for something else, making it much quicker for us to update the overall appearance of the level.

If we ever want to have an infinite level, the groundwork is perfectly laid out, and it's something we are interested in doing if we have the opportunity.

Anyway, if you are reading this have a good day.