Level Design Development Log 3: Finalising Level
In this third and final development log, the level’s features will be finalised with playtesting and implementation of sound also being discussed. Some more principles of level design and asset changes will also be brought up as they are implemented in this development phase.
Level Changes:
The platform cinematic was optimised as it was a little tedious if the player had all three reliefs and hadn’t put any in yet. It was made so that the player is able to place all the reliefs they have with one button press rather than placing them one by one. The level sequences were also changed as the camera was separated from the individual platform sequences and made into its own sequence as the optimisation meant that the cinematic could show all three platforms rising at the same time so this would be more efficient. The camera was also made to move across the garden area so that the level sequence was more interesting while also showing all the platforms.
To make sure the player knows what they have to do to progress in the game notes were added in the parts of the level that need some kind of direction for the player. This is because the bookcase puzzle and the safe code would take too long without direction and would be quite tedious making for a poor gameplay experience. The note in the office gives a hint as to what order the books need to be placed in and the note in the bedroom tells the player to search the other rooms to find the safe code. As there are four rooms, one digit of the code can be found in each.
The death functionality before didn’t really give much feedback to the player as to what actually happened and also stopped the player from continuing without closing and restarting the game. To mitigate this a death screen when the player is hit by the freezer wall was added so the player actually knows what happened and the game restarts automatically after three seconds.
The end of the game had a similar issue to the death screen as the player wasn’t informed as to what had happened and was unable to move. So an ending screen was added when the player finishes the level so that they are aware and it also restarts the game after five seconds.
To make the ending of the game more interesting a level sequence animation in which the player places the knife into the corpse was added. It is very similar in functionality to the relief placement sequence. More red arrows pointing to the end level were also added that are enabled as soon as the player has the crest in their possession to signify the last stage of the level.
In a GDC (2015) talk about the level design of Gone Home, two of the developers who worked on the game Steve Gaynor and Kate Craig talked about how to make a linear level feel non linear by using “keys and gating to lock off major choke points”. This makes a linear path feel non linear as it seems like the player is free to explore but they actually need specific items to progress that are obtained in a predictable order. To achieve this within the level the positioning of the key items for most of the puzzles was changed so that the player would have to explore the level before being able to easily progress in some of the areas.
Before adding sound to the level, the textures and models were finalised. Mostly only textures were changed although some new models were added in place of old placeholder ones obtained from free asset packs on the Unreal Engine store.
Adding Sound:
To make the level feel more complete sounds were added to some of the aspects of it and to some of the player’s actions. Ambient sound was added to the exterior part of the level and background music to the interior that sets the mood for the level. For the player, a noise when the player uses the flashlight and footstep audio were added. The fire now makes sound when it is activated and when the floor collapses a sound is played for that. Every door now has audio when opened and closed.
Playtest Feedback:
Player Changes:
Originally, the player was made to be quite slow in the level as the intention was to have the player carefully explore the environment rather than just running through the level. However, this was taken to the extreme originally so after some feedback from play testers the speed of the player was changed to make it much quicker but also keeping it with the gameplay idea.
From playtesting, it was discovered that if the player crouched near a wall they were able to see the outside of the level. To fix this the positioning of the player’s camera and mesh in relation to the player’s collision had to be adjusted so that it was on the edge of the collision rather than inside it.
Level Geometry Changes:
The area with the key and the pedestal originally had no way of getting down to the garden as the idea was that the player had to go back through the building after getting the key. This proved to be more of an annoyance though as it required the player to go back through the building multiple times so a spiral staircase was added near the pedestal.
The play testers gave feedback on the sequence in which the floor breaks underneath the player as they stated that the floor was too obvious which meant it could be easily avoided. To change this some more geometry was added to the breakable floor blueprint that mostly blends in with the floor to hide that this floor will break.
In the garden of the level, play testers noted that there was some interior geometry visible on the right side of the garden. To fix this the walls of the garden were made slightly bigger so that they covered all the geometry that shouldn’t be visible.
Door Changes:
The positioning of all the doors in the level was adjusted as a lot of them weren’t placed well so they would clip with geometry when opened.
The doors within the level were able to be constantly opened and closed as noted by the play testers which ruins the immersion of the game. To fix this issue, a new aspect had to be added to the door blueprints which detects whether the door is currently moving so that it can’t be interact with again.
Keypad Changes:
While testing the game, it was made clear that it was hard to know what button the player is going to press when they interact with the keypad. To counteract this issue the colour of the buttons change as the player is hovering over them. The player is able to interact with the UI on the keypad as a widget interaction element is added to the player that emits an invisible line a limited distance away from the player to detect the keypad UI.
Play testers mentioned that the keypad didn’t really feedback to the player well so the keypad blueprint was changed so that a error message is displayed when the player enters the wrong code. There was also optimisation made for camera adjustment as the numbers were a little small for the new position of the camera.
Freezer Changes:
From playtesting, it was clear that the freezer interaction needed some changes because it wasn’t efficient in how it functioned and the UI didn’t update while the player was close to the interaction collision. It also caused some errors that didn’t really affect anything but could be fixed. The freezer relief blueprint was edited so that the UI flowed better.
UI Changes:
During the playtesting stage, feedback was given about the various bits of UI throughout the level. One of these bits of feedback was that the UI text was sometimes unreadable when the player is using the flashlight so an outline was added to the text to stop this. Another bit of feedback was that most of the interaction UI has too much space in the text. This is because of the way the interaction text was done so that it could be used on multiple items but it causes a space sometimes as the item name is a different text element. To fix this the interaction text had to be changed to use a different method where only one text element contains all of the text including the item name while still allowing it to be changed for different items.
The last bit of feedback was that there is no UI Prompt telling the player that they don’t have an item so the player won’t know if they can interact with parts of the level without the required item. A message was implemented to all blueprints that involve the player placing items so that they know it can be interacted with before they have the item.
References:
GDC (2015) The Level Design of Gone Home [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/n6__ftHSEfM [Accessed 28/04/22].