Game Structure Storyboard

The level needs to be designed in great detail in order for the team to organise what visual assets need to be created, what user interface needs to be implemented and ensure that we develop all the animations that we are going to need.

We have created a basic storyline for what is going to happen in the game and I have broken this down into 12 simple steps in this other blog post.

The level needs to be long enough to implement the puzzles but also short enough that we are able to build the vertical slice in time. This is another reason that the parallax scrolling is a great design decision for us to make - we will have to spend less time building the game backgrounds. We can break the gameplay down to 8 scenes; the introduction to movement, the 6 puzzles and then the finishing scene where the player will jump down to the next region.

The most common dimensions for mobile devices is 1080x1920 so these are dimensions that we will use to design the game inside unity and create the backgrounds in. Then of course, the game can be scaled up if we are to use a larger device such as an iPad at the arcade event.

So, for the level design, we can split the gameplay into 8 frames of dimensions 1080x1920 when it comes to organising the layout, or 16:9. Each scene will connect to the next but splitting it into eight parts will simplify design and development.

It would be most helpful to draw up how each scene will look with the puzzle implemented in order to guide the building development of the game in unity.

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Emilia and I drew up the design for the game level together. We rolled paper out and onto a wall and then printed out or drew assets to piece together the structure and interactions of the level. The most important part for our development was working out the scale between the islands and the player-character so the initial build could be put into unity so then I could begin experimenting with the player movement and distances between each interaction.

Here is a short video showing to show how we accomplished this prototype together, making use of the space in our flat to scale up our working and play around with scale, as well as manually move assets around to work out the best structure for the level.

Below I have shown how we split up the level into eight parts to refine the design process so we were able to more thoroughly organise ourselves. Each part has been demonstrated to show how the player will interact within it, which key assets will be present and therefore what we need to create as a team to finish each scene.

After completing this activity, we were able to create a more refined asset list to improve organisation and work out what we need to develop within the next few weeks. This was uploaded to the Trello board and any necessary changes have been applied to the project scope.

The images above show parts of the process where we created a stop-motion animation to show how the player will traverse the game environment and complete the objectives.