Level Design

The rest of the game design notes

| Taro Omiya

Here’s a dump of all the design decisions I’ve made on The Sentient Cube.

levelDebug

First, the debug level. Always gotta have one for Unity. It’s a great place to create prefabs, and tweak the numbers to apply to the rest of the levels. Also a great place to test stuff, like the water block (top-left), unattainable block (top), bouncy block (top-right, unused in game), ice block (not shown), and rocket boosters (red, left).

levelHowToPlay

How to Play was a nasty one. The first curve is there to give a clear and empty view for the player to practice the controls. It also puts the Goal out of view, making it easier for me to teach the basic objective of the game: collect smaller objects. The first bend is where I scatter the smallest objects, and provide the instructions to roll into them. I’ve put a lot of objects there to show them lighting up as you get bigger.

Proceeding forward, I have this weird bend that stretched all the way to the left. The straight-way itself is intended to let the player practice collecting bigger objects, in a true breadcrumb fashion. It’s also here that I mention the arrow at the top of the screen, that it indicates where the goal is (straight ahead). It’s worth mentioning that I call this bend “weird” because it was also intended to hide a problem: Unity’s default GUI shader draws over all other objects. By placing it to the far-left, the player wouldn’t see the text at the beginning of the level. The shader that corrects this weird overlap is openly available online, but to respect Compo rules, I didn’t copy this shader; I merely hid it.

level1

Level 1 was actually the second level I created, code-named “pyramid.”  This level simply acts like a practice level, where the goal was clearly above you, and the objective was simple get large enough to be able to climb up the steps.  The bouncing spheres was a small challenge I’ve added to make things a little more interesting, i.e. you have to time it correctly to obtain each sphere.  Past that, it’s a pretty generic Katamari level.

level2

In Level 2, I wanted to establish that the Goal could be anywhere.  In this level’s case, directly below you!  This was actually the first level I created, and you can tell from the knocked over objects I really just zoomed through this.  It was the first place, though, where I got a good handle on the amphitheater formation.

level3

In Level 3, I introduce the rockets!  I initially intended the rockets to help you fly upwards, but that was nearly impossible to do with the given control scheme.  Instead, I found it useful to traverse great distances due to its added speed, and decided to do a level designed to demonstrate just that.  To acknowledge that players may simply wants to play around with the rockets, I placed slopes around the Goal to make it easier for them to reach it.

level4

In Level 4, I introduce the water block and the ice block rather haphazardly.  This was the last level I created, and I simply had very little time left, so I dumped every new assets I had into it.  The walls surrounding the ice is there to prevent both you and the objects you’re trying to stick from falling out, making it easier to collect things.  The objects are placed almost randomly, partly because of the chaotic nature of the ice-block.  The water blocks were intended for helping you adjust your controls, but in the end, they ended up being pretty useless.

levelCredits

And the Credits. This was actually hard to design, mainly due to tweaking the size of the breadcrumbs so you can definitely grab each text. Other than that, it’s intentionally a breadcrumb-to-breadcrumb level with no other purpose than, well, providing the credits.

Interested? Try The Sentient Cube here, and please rate the game!

Understanding Katamari: the level design of The Sentient Cube

| Taro Omiya

Designing the levels for The Sentient Cube was a fascinating exercise, and one that provided a great insight in how Katamari Damacy was designed.  Both games have very lenient win conditions, and as such, have equally lenient level design that can be both creative and flexible.  Broadly speaking, there are two types of object placements used in The Sentient Cube: the breadcrumb and amphitheater formation.

breadcrumbFormation

Breadcrumb Formation

The breadcrumb formation is the easier one to understand, yet harder to setup.  In short, it’s a placement of increasingly larger objects placed into a trail for the player to follow.  It’s purpose is simple: to lead the player towards a specific point of interest.  This is most obvious in The Sentient Cube under the “How to Play”, “Level 3”, and “Credits” levels where they’re designed to introduce the player a new concept.  In “How To Play”, the breadcrumbs literally lead the player to the goal.  In “Level 3,” it leads the player to the rockets, which they can use to traverse through the large expanse very quickly.  Furthermore, the rest is intended to lead the player to the goal, much like “How To Play.”  Lastly, the “Credits” leads the player to each text in the game, making it more likely that they’ll spend the time to read it.

One interesting tidbits I learned from using the breadcrumb formation was that making a simple, straight trail was actually the worst way to implement this idea.  With the exception of the “How to Play” where the player needs to be guided to the goal, a straight trail feels too easy and boring.  Instead, it’s better to have the trail curve, and even place obstacles around those curves to emphasize it.  This is most evident in “Level 2” where I zig-zag the breadcrumbs; “Level 3” where it creates a small ‘C’ to lead you to the rockets; and “Level 4” where obstacles obstructs your view from seeing the next breadcrumb.

amphitheaterFormation

Amphitheater Formation

The amphitheater formation is a little less easier to understand, yet easier to implement.  In this formation, objects are placed in concentric circles with each layer consisting of similar sized objects.  As the layer gets farther away from the center, the objects gets bigger.  The formation is like that of the breadcrumbs, but in all direction.  Unlike the breadcrumb formation, amphitheater is flexible enough to allow quite a difference in size for each circle, which gives the level designer some flexibility.  This is seen in “Level 1”, “Level 2”, and “Level 4” where the objective is simply to grow big enough to roll over walls.

Similar to breadcrumb formation, variation in sizes within each layer is a lot more interesting to the player than the same size.  Additionally, each layer should increase in size exponentially rather than linearly.  Other than that, you can be pretty creative with it, making it square-shaped, putting objects at different elevations, putting gaps between cross sections, or even making them bounce.

Conclusion

Honestly, this game genre is surprisingly simple when it comes to level design.  With its loose restrictions, it’s easy to get creative on what kind of setting you’d like to create, let it be in Japan, USA, underwater, in space, etc.  Hopefully this will help and encourage others in exploring this great idea.

Interested? Try The Sentient Cube here, and please rate the game!