Arbiter - Monthly Recap - November 2020 (Patreon)

It's that time again! Hope everyone's been staying safe and getting excited for the holidays! I've been blasting Christmas music and consuming Rice Krispie Squares at an alarming rate, but 2020 be damned I will have my Christmas cheer. I hope you'll all do the same.

Anyways, since last month I've moved over to level design. It's probably the area I have the least amount of experience in, so I figured it was time to start working those muscles. The level I'm working on currently is for a new demo, so I guess that's a thing. No ETA on when it'll be released, but I'd like to have something more representative of the full game than... whatever that old demo is.

I'm currently in the block-out phase, which basically means I'm creating the framework for the level without any actual environments or anything. It's been... an experience, learning this stuff, and as I mentioned before it's definitely not my strong suit. That said, I feel I've been making some good progress, and have been making liberal use of tools like ProBuilder to prototype and test levels as fast as possible. 

Most of my time over the last few weeks has been spent studying, practicing, and testing different level design concepts. I've also implemented some new systems to make traversing the levels a little more fun than just running from Point A to Point B. Fun movement systems that allow you to get through a level quickly and stylishly are super important to me, so expect a lot more of this kind of stuff. In general I'd say Arbiter's levels will be focused on combat, fun/fast traversal, and some minor platforming. They're also intended to be a linear sequence of open areas, rather than strictly linear or open world.

For research, I've been doing a combination of playing some of my favourite games, seeing how they handle certain level design concepts, and studying game levels directly in no clip. No Clip's about the best you could ask for in terms of studying PS2-era level design, so I'd highly recommend it for those interested. 

Based on what I've been studying and the direction I'm going with my level design, I'd say Arbiter's biggest inspirations are Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, and Dark Souls. I like KH's simplicity and effort to make every single area feel unique, and I like Zelda's focused/disciplined design where they only use what they absolutely need, with no wasted assets or space. Zelda and KH also have lots of cheeky little tricks to make their levels pretty and performant, so that's all been pretty informative too.

Lastly, I like Souls' intelligent use of space and overlapping level design, partially because it's just fun to play through, but it also saves you a lot of headaches/resources since there's overall less space you have to fill in. This is of course super important to me since I'm largely making the game by myself, so any cheats I can use to make that process easier are more than welcome. I'm not sure how Arbiter's levels will look when they're finished, but it'll likely be a combination of these three games among lessons learned elsewhere.

Anyways, sorry I don't have more to show, but I hope this was informative! I've been in such a comfort zone with the character modeling that I honestly kind of forgot how it feels to be so lost with something that you genuinely just "don't know where to start." I'm feeling a lot better about where I'm at now though, and the process has actually started to get kinda fun. It's been slow, but I'm learning!

Friendly reminder that there's an Arbiter Discord! Feel free to join if you want to talk about  game dev, Rice Krispies, life, or nothing at all. We'd love to have you ^^

Cheers,
Jordy