[Storyboard] Arriving at Claw Bay (Patreon)

Next cutscene 

We're digging into the first section of gameplay. This takes place after the prologue (chapter 0) and is Billie's first adventure, as she seeks out the famed Kraken. Billie attempts her first spell and uses her umbrella to create a portal to the island. 

Unknowingly to her, she was spotted using her magic by a trio of cat pirates working for their Captain and Queen, Elaine, seen in the cutscene above. Quickly captured for her abilities, the pirates take her to their stronghold. This is where the vertical slice will start.

In the cutscene, you'll notice Aristotle (the axolotl) talking to Billie through her enchanted bell. Aristotle is Billie's mentor/teacher for magic, and will also serve as a guide throughout the levels. You'll be able to ring them when you need hints, guidance or background information. 

In lore terms, to teleport to a location you need a bookmark from there. Collect an item from the surrounding area and enchant it. You can now carry this item with you and teleport back to its original location. In lamens terms, you need to have traveled there previously. In this cutscene, Aristotle already has an enchanted bottle of sand from the beaches of Claw Bay. This stops Billie from teleporting herself instantly to locations, thus completely defeating the point of platforming, and also gives her a chance to create fast travel locations or checkpoints. I'm still unsure if she will be able to pick random items at any point during the game, or if we specify these points for the player in the form of a pickup. 

Trivia: Claw Bay is a pun name based off the real pirate stronghold, Clew Bay. Which was also run by a Pirate Queen. 

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It's exciting to finally dive into the level design, it's taken a long time to reach our stride as this was an extremely stressful part of the process for me personally. I'm so proud of the accomplishments of our team, every member has provided something amazing. Great concepts and storyboards (Ashlee), fantastic animation, art and tools (Luke), and fun bouncy controls (James). However, one last piece remains, level design. When you add all these elements together, will they work well together? the level design and layout of the game is the final and most important piece of the puzzle, that ties the whole experience together. Over the months we've refined our level design documents and found an easy workflow that works for all of us. Here is an example of some of the questions I ask myself:

• What is the player's goal at this exact moment? How are you communicating this goal to them?  How does it serve the story? Does it feel natural? 
• Where is the player within the game? Do they know how to use these skills yet? Can I ramp up the difficulty here, or are they learning the skill for the first time? 
• How will Billie and Oscar work together? What if it's single-player? What if its co-operative play? Can both methods of play co-exist in this map without player 2 sitting around aimlessly? 
• How often will the player have to switch characters in single player? Make sure they're not constantly swapping back and forth without a break.
• What environments do I want to show off? 
• How long with this mission take, is it linear or open? 
• What is the player's reward for completing the mission? 

There are more questions that go into building a level, naturally, but finding a way to put this down in a coherent way was certainly difficult for me, but I'd like to think that spending the extra time on this will pay off with a satisfying player experience, and it's not something I'd would want to rush. The first vertical slice is fully planned now and I'm very excited to start sharing it with you! We're getting to the fun part now, building!