The Climb
Blog 1
The Climb is a 2D dungeon crawler that uses turn based combat as well as a real time 'climbing' phase. The game’s progress has been steady so far and my group has been good at communicating what is expected for each sprint. I have felt very involved in the project right from the beginning. So far, I am playing the lead role in designing our levels for both phases of our game. It has me using many of the techniques from previous courses and projects as well as resources I, and my lead, have found for better implementation of our games vision, such as tile maps and proper use of prefabs for enemies.
Blog 2
We finally had enough of a game to administer an alpha playtest. We received a lot of feedback on the turn-based movement system and it was a resounding failure and the players did not like it at all. After meeting as a team we all decided that moving away from this system was in the best interest of the game and our development. We have since removed turn based movement and are now focusing on real time movement that is reminiscent of the bullet hell phase that remains the same. Since this change I have been working to reconfigure our levels and prefabs to better fit this new vision. Our prefabs were all box colliders that worked well for turn based movement but I have since remade many of them to be more rounded and forgiving so that players can focus on speed and kiting enemies without getting gripped by a sharp edge from a collider.
In this blog post I’ll be covering work I did in Sprints 1-4. So far, my work has been very directed and streamlined into focusing on our level layout and look. In Sprint 1 I gathered concept art and references for the layout and enemy encounters. I created rough drafts of the levels in photoshop for the turn-based sections and the real time climbing sections. In Sprint 2 I updated said levels after feedback from my lead and learned how to use tile maps for unity, which helped tremendously for future levels. With the tile maps in place, I updated the tutorial level to better show our enemy encounters and layout. I also moved my work over into the Unity Collab group because we realized that it made more sense to have the level designer use it instead of our artist; we were limited to 3 people for access to unity collab.
A few of the references I gathered for Climbing and Combat phases
On the left is my annotated map made in PS and on the right is it implemented into Unity
As you can see above the changes made from the annotated map into Unity were sometimes significant but having the map as a point of reference made creating the level much easier.
Sprint 4 was very productive for me and after feedback from my project lead, we decided to split up the first level into 3 sections that were loosely based off of the map you can see above.
Using the initial map in Unity I separated each section into levels for 1-1, 1-2, and 1-3. If you look closely the backbone from the first map is present throughout the new versions. I took the framework of the initial map and fleshed it out not only adding more variety for players but more periods of rest in between. I really liked this change as it made working out new levels much easier and also allowed us to use work I already had and implement it into the levels our first play testers would be operating in. It also added more length and diversity while also being a cleaner version to edit and adjust. I did healthy doses of internal playtesting to better balance and set enemy encounters. Finally, I added all the colliders we would need to keep players in bounds of the levels.
Revised level 1-1
Revised level 1-2
Revised level 1-3
Enemies have also been changed to better fit our new movement system and they now move quicker, more aggressively, and hit significantly harder. Overall, this change has been very positive for us but there have been issues. Our enemy pathfinding system had to be reworked by our programmer and it has been a challenge to get it working correctly for the three different enemy types but we are making progress to be ready for our beta build. I removed our collider tiles since they became irrelevant and have moved to making all prefabs reflect our new goals for real time movement. I have been researching games similar to ours to see how to best make our levels engaging to explore and move around.
This change to real time movement has also allowed me to open up our levels more since the player will be traveling much faster than before. I have added new paths and collectables for players to find as well as giving them more room to maneuver around enemies.
Level 1-1 has more alternate and hidden paths for collectibles
I have also been looking at the second set of levels which will feature ranged enemies as well as a new theme much different from our forest level. The second level has humanoid enemies that inhabit a ruined village or town and will require more of me to make it challenging and fun to explore. I expect it to be a bit easier and quicker to design since I have a lot more experience with unity and the vision of our game than when we first started making our game.
The changes to our movement system was the biggest obstacle we faced as a group but thankfully I think it will make our game much better in the long run and give more options for me as a level designer. I have yet to start the rough drafts for our second level which has been sitting in Trello for a few weeks now but since I had to go back and rework our first levels it had to be placed as a lower priority task.
Unfortunately, we have had to remove weapons from the game as of now because movement and enemies are taking priority over it and it is a shame a lot of our work had to be put on hold or discarded because of the changes we have had to make. It has been a lesson for me to not get too ahead of ourselves before we know what the players will like because I had multiple levels designed and ready for turn based movement which now all have to be reworked to fit our current scope. It has not been fun to rework stuff I already thought was done but nevertheless I am confident we can come away from this change and make a much more compelling product.
Level 1-2 also got a few new paths
I ran into some problems while remaking the prefabs as it was difficult to get the new colliders to match well with the prefabs we already had in place, an expected result since I made them with the idea of turn based movement in mind. Therefore, I have redesigned many of them to better fit the new colliders.
Blog 3
Sprint 6 was very successful for the team and although some serious problems arose close to the beta due date, we were able to rally and get a great version of the game for the play testers. This sprint I spent a lot of time working on our second set of levels that take the players out of the forest and into a bandit ridden village. This included making new prefabs for the levels and creating distinct tile maps. The new encounters will include ranged enemies so the levels will reflect this feature and be more open ended than the previous forest encounters. The player also has access to different weapons and collects gems to increase their score.
Unfortunately, we were not able to include the second set of levels for the beta build and we had to push back this addition because of issues regarding enemy hit detecting that required serious work in our code to fix. I was forced to revert to a previous local build that erased some of my progress for the sprint. The problem persisted only after building out the game to mobile and was eventually solved by creating a new system that created invincibility frames for the enemies after being attacked which bypassed the problem with hit detection.
Overall, I have really enjoyed creating the levels for our dungeon crawler because we have a lot of features and things for the player to do within each one, especially now that we have added ranged enemies. There is a sense of satisfaction that we are making something ambitious and fun for the players and because of the limitations on mobile it has been enjoyable to discuss our thoughts on development through this lens rather than on a PC. I have our finale level completed for the project and besides tweaking enemies and testing for bugs the only thing left is to publish our game to the Google Play store!
Thank you so much for reading and seeing the process of making The Climb.
I also added new colliders for the climbing phase to reflect movement changes as well as adding health and weapon pickups for the player to gather. Enemy stats and placement were also altered on the forest levels after internal playtesting and consideration. Finally, I modified our google form to ask appropriate and valuable questions that show all of the work we put in this sprint.
Level 2-1 in a ruined bandit ridden village
The transition to mobile development has been very beneficial for my progress as a developer especially because we have had to consider hardware limitations and acutely focus on the player experience while only using their fingers on a screen. We spent a lot of time adjusting player movement and overall feel to make sure that game is satisfying for a mobile audience.
While unfortunate, we were able to come together as a team and get the build in great shape before the beta build and we received great feedback on our current levels and showed direction for the final sprint. The team worked hard this sprint because we all want to get closer to the finishing the project we set out to make. Having finished the final set of combat level and climbing levels I created a finale level that finally has the player reach the top of the mountain and finish their journey. It was a simple level but I was actually really proud of it and felt like a satisfying finish to the game.
This was an impactful learning experience for us as a group and showed us that we need to be doing more play testing amongst ourselves and on mobile not just through the Unity editor, if we had done so we could have caught problems much earlier rather than last minute. I also learned as a level designer about having more consistent progress on my levels and communicating as much as possible with my lead to make sure that the biomes are matching his vision for the project.
I spent a lot of time working on our second set of levels that takes the player out of the forest and into destroyed villages that have been invaded by bandits and kobolds. It also introduces our first ranged enemies to the game and overall, a much larger level for the players to move around in. Level 2-1 and 2-2 include large paths and clusters of houses filled with treasure, hearts, and enemies.
Designing the levels and balancing around the new ranged enemies was a fun challenge and also makes the levels much more interesting. I reused a lot of the flora assets from the first levels and combined them with the new village assets that included destroyed buildings, bloodied treasure chests, and carts.
The finale level