College Project: Skills Gap 1 - Part 1

As part of my B1 progression unit in college, this week I've been working on developing my level design skills by working on a mobile game I'd been working on previously.

This game is a bullet hell style game, with the levels being based on “The Fool’s journey” from tarot cards. Each level is represented by one of the 21 major arcana, with its obstacles being based off their themes.

I’m aiming to have at least three levels designed and playable including the tutorial level. I’d already created the movement, simple projectiles and some basic art assets over the summer.

While working on it this week I heavily referanced these charts from www.learntarot.com

Designing the Tutorial

I felt the first obstacle the player must face should be slow, obvious and easy to doge, as the end of the level approaches they would increase in speed.

Sticking to the theme of tarot cards, the obstacles used took the form of the minor arcana, In this case I thought of the Pentacle.

They are round so they work great as projectiles and they have keywords like: Trusting, cautious, practical and unadventurous. I’m thinking that the common design used for pentacles in tarot looks like a coin, that the player could think they are supposed to run into it instead. While this isn’t ideal it could work thematically, as it plays with the players’ trust and caution, and works to teach the player how they can be hit and what happens if they are.

At first, they would move slow to give plenty of time to doge them, but once the player has gone through this a few times their speed increases and the pattern to doge becomes more complex. This fits with the themes of The Fool like “Spontaneity,” “Faith” and “Apparent Folly.”

Here is my design for the pentacle, the art for the game uses simple shapes and limited colours. The major arcana would be in black and white, but the obstacles would have their own colour schemes.

Creating the Tutorial

I scaled the projectile to be just bigger than the player so that two of them could fit in a line and the player could still get past, but three would completely block their path.

I added a rotation animation to give them some movement and that meant I also had to learn to use curves in the unity animator.

I had to change the curve to linear to create a smooth rotation.

The last visual additon was to add a red glow effect. To not confuse the player the effects of projectiles should be colour coded, for example red meaning you take damage.

Getting the effect, I wanted took longer than I thought it would. I got it eventually, but I had to use some post-processing. Meaning I had to tweak the lighting of the entire scene until it looked right.

As the player moves fast enough already, I just made them sit stationary to be deliberately easy. That, as well as the simple pattern, will contrast with the faster moving and more chaotic obstacles after them.

After this section the player will activate a trigger that causes the next set of pentacles to start moving. These will actually move and will be animated to spin faster to clearly convey to the player that they have to react faster. Ideally, I’d have this line up with a swell in the music all to try and catch the unsuspecting player off guard.

This is what I designed for that section:

The idea is that the player would have to move from left to right in quick succession in order to not take damage.

In the end I think I was able to implement the right level of challenge for the tutorial. While I feel like the faster section is a little underwhelming, I don’t think I could improve on it without making it too unfair for a tutorial.

Tutorial Gameplay