Ryan - Games Design

The level design is going much smoother now! The shape works better overall and I feel confident I can develop it further in the coming weeks. I have added the cinematic to showcase the sigil appearance beneath the meat grinder and altered it so one section of it appears per enemy thrown in. The game will complete once all three have appeared. I have a few spots that I currently have no gameplay for but I will spend the Easter break coming up with ideas to fill them with and to help the player deviate from the critical path. Everything seems to be going well on this project so far!

I have gone back to the drawing board after a week of level blockout as I felt the design I had was too linear and systematic. The space was very "room like" being a large cuboid like most other levels, so I am thinking to make it cylindrical like a tower instead. Blueprinting has gone well, the meat grinder works well! I will most likely need to use more visual cues to show the player the progression of the blood tank, I currently have a "sigil" that appears (it is, in fact, a large bloody recycling symbol!) but I will also work with cinematics to progress this further. Back to the level design layout for now!

Development is coming on nicely. Simple combat mechanics, player animations and enemy AI have taken shape nicely. The focus for now will be to create the level puzzle. For this level I will be creating a giant meat grinder/blender at the centre of the level for the player to throw enemy bodies into. This will fill the "Blood Tank" and allow players to progress. I will be using simple blockout models to create this and adding particle effects to highten it more. Once this is built, the level blockout will continue around it.

The design document is complete and I have moved on to blocking out the level and blueprinting key elements such as combat and enemy AI. The enemies will have simple AI, they will simply walk towards the player and begin to attack them, this is purely to free up development time on elements that need more visual aspects such as player attack animations, ragdolling corpses and being able to pick up the enemy once they are dead. The next few weeks will be full on with development so I will tackle each stage as they appear.

I have been hard at work putting together a design document for this project, but the key points are the environmental puzzles based on necromancy and using enemies corpses to solve problems! The player character wants to remove their curse, so they head to the lair of the necromancer who cursed the sword and they use their undead armies to stave off the blade's hunger and to progress through the space. I have decided that the main gameplay feel is based on a combination of the Crystal Maze and Peter Jackson's Braindead, which will certainly add a unique perspective for players!