Creating a simple level17/01/2012

My first lesson back and today we was told after reading through Ed Bryne's article, that we were going to attempt in pairs to create a simple level in a similar theme to his i.e. a puzzle, simple to understand, and with no prompt on how to complete the level the user had to be able to pick it up and play, much like last semester where we said if we haven't hooked the player within 15 seconds of picking the game up we would have failed.

Dale's and My idea:

Our idea  was a ninja that would jump from post to post to reach the end goal starting from the left of the screen and ending on the right. At the end of the level the player would have to chose out of 2 rings of fire to chose to jump through, one would go to the next level and the other back to the start. Also as well as jumping the player can swing from hooks that are strategically placed around the level.

To add more danger we also put obstacles at the top and bottom of the page that if touched would send the player back to the start.

The only goal of our game was to reach the end because your master is telling you that you mus train (like the incentive of the ringmaster in Bryne's article whom we never see but the incentive is there) and jump through the correct ring of fire which is simple, easy to use and understand and all of the aspects of the game where tied in to the theme of a ninja.

Once Rob had been round we established that we shouldn't tell the player your either wrong or right we should show them a brief insight into the correct way to finish the level. From this Rob showed us that if we did something simple like colour code the logs the ninja was jumping on and the rings of fire we could establish that the player would have to jump on the specific colours and jump through the corresponding hoop, either the same colour or through patterns thus making a game a puzzle rather than a game where the answers were already given to you at the start. 

Lastly we established that we shouldn't make it so the player controls the height and control over the way that they jump and swing as this becomes a game of skill rather than a puzzle, so we need to do some alterations to make the game more of a puzzle rather than a skill based game with puzzle elements. 

This is just a brief run through of my first lesson back and what we have done with our time.

-Dan