Japan

Responsibilities:

Design concept

Top down map

Enemy creation

Encounters setups

Iteration and balancing (But not the boss)

 

This level was actually designed and implemented after my work on Tunisia. I bring this up because the lessons we learned implementing that level greatly influenced the design of Japan. The main lesson being that we should make our levels smaller. Where Tunisia is about large areas and vast vistas Japan is more tightly packed. The level has high walls to cut down on draw distances and the gameplay areas are significantly smaller.

 

The design of the enemies is also something different. The focus was on the weapons and I let that dictate the rest of the design of the enemies. I wanted to have a heavy focus for the player to be on using kill moves to disarm enemies. Knowing that I wanted the weapons to be different so that the player had a bit of variety in the combat experience. Having the focus be on the weapons also allowed for me to create some that would function as tools to solve puzzles.

 

The focus of the boss fight was to get the player to interact more with the environment. The goal of the encounter is to bring down the temple. Unfortunately this isn't clear. The scenes that I wrote to spell out the rules of engagement to the player didn't make it into the shipped product. Again a causality of me working on another title during the implementation and balancing of the encounter.

 

That aside, the player is meant to take out the supports to each of the levels as they avoid the attacks of the boss. The one clue from my original design that did make it into the final product is as you fight the boss he will occasionally grab the player and throw them at a support. Not perfect but it is at least some sort of a hint.

 

Though not implemented perfectly it is still an interesting fight.