Untitled - Game Mechanics and Level Design

By Malon

For the first two weeks of this module, I've been focusing on the design and development of  our game's levels and gameplay mechanics. as well as contributing to the game's main concept in its early stages. Ideas I contributed during the concept stage included use of physics objects and forms of time travel as puzzle elements, in a manner that would allow me to create diverse and engaging puzzles as level designer for the game.

After designing the first level for the game as a demonstration, I proceeded to implement the map into Unity, ignoring visual details to focus solely on the mechanical aspects of the game. this also involved scripting the different functions required to demonstrate how the game would function.

A basic demonstration of the game's level design and puzzle mechanics, briefly showed during our presentation.

The first step in creating the demo was creating the controller needed for the player character to navigate the level. This was a bit of a challenge for me, since I hadn't created a 3rd person character controller for a Unity game prior to this project, so I referred to learning resources on websites like YouTube, Medium, Reddit and Unity's official support forum. This particularly helped in regards to programming the character's movement using the MathF functions, as well as programming dynamic camera movement, which helped give a rough idea of how cameras would function in the final version of the game. Another challenge I overcame during the prototyping of this level was implementing a lite inventory system to display key puzzle items that the player picks up in a level. By following a tutorial on how to implement an inventory system into our game, I developed a good understanding of scriptable objects, which allowed me to also create a message system to streamline creating HUD elements that require text, as well as providing feedback to the player with live on-screen notifications. The next step, after the creation of this demo and following the design of subsequent levels, will be to implement physics objects that can be incorporated into puzzles and creating puzzles that consider verticality and use more space in a level.