Level Design Postmortem

What went right?

Believe it or not, mostly everything went right. As far as striving to be a level designer, I feel that these levels have had the most real testing. There were tons of feedback and tons of iterations. All to come out with a product that is receiving similar results. To me, that's pretty amazing. I know I have a long way to go in order to be considered a true, "level designer" but, my actions through out the past twenty weeks makes me feel really good. Don't take that wrongly folks. It's teamwork, we all did are parts. I'm sure y'all are proud of your contributions. I feel that mine was pretty darn successful. It started out really rough for players, but it got much better...some even say "fun." Basically, (1) the levels have come a long way.

Bottom line, I feel that the level design process for Time Blunders was very successful.

What went wrong?

Velocity. That changes things in a bad way sometimes. Oh, oh...don't get me wrong, I love velocity, it's real. It just changed a lot of plotted gameplay mechanics, quickly. However, that really wasn't a problem. The level design is so dynamic that it's literally just going in and moving things around. Not tough. Just time consuming. The art folks on the other hand, sometimes they get upset. Just read their postmortems and I bet you'll find out. Honestly, nothing really went terribly wrong with the level. The sleepless hours of Nintendo Power flowchart research proved to be very useful. However, it's dated...but so is Mancala.

As far as milestones, I hit a majority of them on time. Some were delayed...and one week was set aside for Capstone, my choice. Hey...what a ya gonna do...life's tough.

What for the Future?

In the event of another 2D platformer. I would like to make a base array of "bug free" level features. Certain shapes pre-created that have respectable/correct flow capabilities that match the players abilities, allowing for a Lego-like level construction. In other words. Don't perform the mechanics & fix while walking through the level. Create all jump/platform heights, jumpThru platforms, hills, bumps, ledges, lips, hang-offs, slopes, and etc. in, (essentially on an "L platform", programmer art) the beginning of the level. Allowing all level properties to be fine tuned in one specific area. Then they can be duplicated, (as groups or individual pieces) and positioned as needed. I think that would speed up the development process a bit. I think it would also lend more to the creative styles of the individual level features.

Thanks. Cheers.