Full Commented Gameplay
If you want a summary of what the game is and how I made this level in a friendly and commented way, watch the video below.
If you want to know more details about the level, keep scrolling down, I'm sure you'll love learning about my entire level design process.
Overview
IMO is a strategy tower defense where the objective is to eliminate the errant shapes before the enigmatic monuments deteriorate
To develop this project, my 3 friends and I had exactly 28 days to create this game. With that in mind, to have a nice variety of levels in the time we had, we thought about creating 3 levels, each with its own basic difficulty. (easy, medium and hard)
Inception is the easiest level in the game, so we needed something that would show the game's gameplay in a simple and effective way.
LEVEL NAME: Inception
DURATION: 5 Days
SOFTWARES USED: Maya & Unity
Paper Designs
These are the paper designs I initially sketched to determine the layout. It served as an initial idea to start building the level
An important point is that all levels in the game have 3 variations, which appear depending on how the player progresses during the level.
If the player lets some enemies pass through the portal, it is still possible to defeat them in the next stages of the level, but with some variations of the scenario that will help the player... or harm him.
From left to right in the image, you can see the variations I created for the level.
In the first image on the left, we have the complete level, with just 1 enemy spawn and 1 portal that abducts enemies and takes them to the next stage of the level, if they enter the portal. In addition, we have 4 obelisks, a place we call ourselves where the player can place their towers to eliminate enemies.
In the second image in the middle, we have the second stage of the level, where the player "loses" an obelisk during this entire stage, so if the player has placed a tower in that location, the player will lose that tower for now.
In the third image on the right, we have the third and final stage of the level, where if the player is unable to eliminate all the enemies, he will lose the level. At this stage the player will continue without an obelisk, but will have the help of a platform that will appear in the level, a platform that if the player interacts with it and has enemies on top, the player will eliminate all enemies at once.
Translation: Dynamic Objects
Modeling
After finishing my initial layout design, it was time to assemble this level directly in 3D.
In our game, we used a shader that helped us create the entire artistic style we wanted to implement for the game. With this in mind, the 3D models that I modeled did not need any texture, it was just necessary to make the 3D models.
To start modeling I used the Autodesk Maya, which is a software that I have good knowledge. Using the Blueprint (Paper Design) image as a basis for the design, I started making the level in 3D, doing square by square like the blueprint layout.
Setting up square by square, I was able to have an exact layout of the level in the final game, having good spacing of the player's towers and nice framing for the enemies that would walk through the level. This exact layout can be seen in the last image on the right, where we have a print of the top view of the level that is very faithful to the Blueprint. (paper design)
During the production of the game, we discovered that to make the enemies walk over the level I created, it was necessary to create a NavMesh, which would serve as a "guide" space so that the AIs could understand the floor of the level where they can to walk.
At that time, we weren't sure how to do this directly in Unity in an easy way, so I had an idea, I modeled a plan that covered the entire length of the level only where the enemies can walk and then exported it for Unity to configure the enemies on that specific plane.
Variations
After finishing the base modeling of the level, it was necessary to make its variations. The idea we had was to make the levels get weaker as each variation appeared to the player.
With this in mind, my idea was to create small fractures that would fly through the air, with these pieces coming out of the structure of the level itself, as if the level was collapsing.
This part was easier, I created several blocks of different shapes, placed them in random locations on the level and used Booleans > Difference, so that the level's mesh was cut exactly in the shape of the piece I created.
After making the cuts in the level layout, I just needed to make the pieces fly around the map to give the appearance that the pieces are floating after being disconnected from the level.
The coolest idea I had thought of was to make it so that we could make an animation when we went from one variation to another in the level, showing these small pieces disconnecting from the main structure of the level. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to do this.
Conclusion
This was the first level I did in a Game Jam and I believe I did very well doing it. I learned to do things in a quick and organized way, following the step-by-step level development production that I know today.
Some things about my production I would definitely change nowadays, but looking back, this was a level that met the expectations of the team and the people who played it, as it demonstrates a low difficulty level and delivers the complete gameplay of the game, It was exactly what we were looking for to do with the first level of the game.
