Hello, Thomas Härdin, Lead Game Design of group Fenrir here.
Today i will be covering something that i have wanted to work on for some time but was unable to due to the status of the game earlier. Namely map layout.
So what do i mean by map layout? Well essentially it is the structure of everything you can move on and interact with in our game, mainly focused on the rooms that the main character spy is moving around in and between. At earlier stages of our game i have been meaning to work with this but i couldn't either due to lack of programmed interactions or lack of art assets to use for it. Lately however i have had the means i need to build the labyrinth of rooms we desired for the game. As a start i put in a bunch of walls and doors to fill out a playable space followed by making some temporare decoration art to make the rooms feel a bit more like an office space, but reaching that feeling still is beyond current state and we aim in the end to make it look like an abandoned office building with dust marks and moving-boxes everywhere.
First of i expanded the two rooms we had to test the function of getting through doors by hacking them to about six different rooms, i made a short path to the end because of simplicity when it came to our presentation we were going to hold, but the end goal is way beyond that. As earlier mentioned i will be working towards a real office space labyrinth that the player has to explore, this way we can meet the aesthetic goal of exploration to follow up our earlier ideas about challenge and incorporating the feeling of doing industrial espionage. Thanks to what we have now in terms of code and art i can easily expand the map to thrice the amount of rooms and make hacking levels covering each door.
These are the past and current situations followed by the future plans, thanks for reading!
Hello Thomas, I like that you have a plan to make it into an exploration game and therefor need to focus on the map layout. I know that this is a very timeconsuming and not always very rewarding task. I wrote in my own blog that "no one notices good level creation, but everyone notices bad level creation.
SvaraRaderaMaking a short-cut was a great move in terms of demonstrating your game. I feel like a lot of people focus too much on making a good presentation over making a good game, hopefully this isn't the case for your group, but I know quite some people struggle with it.
I'm interessted on how you're going to design the map-layout! Do you have a mockup? How does your current map look like. A picture would be nice.
It's great that you're keeping your aesthetic goals in mind when working, even though we're so late into the project.
Keep the vision up and good luck on the final release!
August Ek
Lead Design
Selfish