Floor Plans and Forges

 Hate to say it, but this entire thing needs an overhaul. Especially if I want it to meet the required playtime. I definitely need a strong platforming section, especially to demonstrate the player slowly ascending to the top of the tower. There's an entire narrative I can fit in that's just not described at all within the project as a whole, it's a blatant rush job that makes no sense. Fortunately, there's worthwhile bones that have the space for extending and modifying. Narrative zones to provide context and hints are an easy addition, very low opportunity cost for the value they bring. The level itself needs to be massively extended, two more teleportation zones, likely including one more indoor area followed by an outdoor section should very easily meet the playtime. Current boss is unsatisfying and needs more hit points in order to feel substantial. Scaling it was a bad choice due to the issues that creates with the hitbox, but that's something that can be fixe...

  We can fix it a little. Probably.       First thing that had to go was the invisible borders. Completely uncompelling, made for unclear boundaries, and it was a major issue aligning it with the prebuilt plane geometry (which was also a bad idea, since backface culling creates major holes in the environment thanks to the free floating camera). As it turns out, aligning invisible walls is a major pain, and fixing slight corrections becomes a major chore, since the outline gizmo is thick enough to create slight cracks when it looks aligned.        You tried. A blatant crack in the wall.     So, absolutely none of that. Replaced them all with normal, functional, boxes. The dull boxes to create boundaries could be improved upon in multiple ways. They are functional albeit thoroughly uncompelling. The addition of trees does not change the fact that they are angular, poorly aligned, and uninteresting. More functional than inter...

Numerous issues with getting this to work correctly, including an hour+ spent trying to get it to build correctly on a school computer. About forty five minutes in I was looking up engine development courses out of spite, since I about had it with Unity. Baked maps do not build automatically; there has to be something I'm missing in how they're stored that keeps them from being automatically applied. Contents of current scene file. Will play around with in order to make it port better. Map development followed a pretty typical workflow, as far as I can tell. Whiteboxing to build the basics of terrain, then adding boundaries. I made a mistake by deforming the terrain post-baking and causing issues with enemy behavior. Enemies also suffered since they weren't designed to be duplicated and it caused them not to transport correctly. The use of planes as the primary terrain choice was also a bad idea; backface culling meant that certain perspectives caused the terrain to disappe...

So I guess I decided that the criticism of my beginner levels being too difficult meant that my intermediate level should be trivial. The difficulty spike was a problem; I knew it meant I could throw more punches and assume more things, like the idea that not everything needs to be introduced as a gradual slope, that players are expected to know the basics of their abilities, and it can probably be assumed that players have completed at least three stages before reaching this one. But I made a beginner level. If I was able to resubmit my 'beginner' level as the intermediate one, and the intermediate as the beginner, I absolutely would. This suffered from me not understanding the full possibilities of either weapon I put into the level. O. Slider works on water, which can be used as a kill floor, making it ideal for traversal. I did not use this while other level designers successfully did so. The arrows do not despawn and I had issues with timing and getting long distances, so ...

 Compared to the last level, this one was much better but still probably too hard for the beginning player. I made serious efforts to try and cut down on the difficulty, taking steps to make the platforming sections easier and removing some of the more difficult enemies in the level. Most were placed too early or in conjunction with other enemies in a way that made for some very bad screens. Most screens with enemies benefit by having one enemy removed, turning areas with inevitable damage into challenging encounters. Additionally, with the use of a key system, I decided it'd be appropriate to have branching paths and small fetch quests. I included one key which was made available to people who knew how to 'dig' through dust blocks with the mega buster that allowed them to skip the final screen. I had one player tell me that he didn't know why I kept putting dust blocks on the ground where they can't be destroyed, and I just shrugged and said there's a way.  He ...

 So whatever issue I had with DnD is now the complete opposite when it comes to drafting Mega Man levels. My DnD maps were too easy because they were barely playtested other than making sure that encounters were lethal and players could make consistent progress. Since I thought it'd be too daunting to playtest with every combination of classes in mind, I didn't. With Mega Man, I can test every minor change or rotation of block. I can test every thirty seconds if I wanted to.    I put just as much, if not more hours into playing the Mega Man level than I did editing it because there is absolutely no pre-measuring, or assumptions, or rules of thumb that beat rigorous playtesting. Aspects of the level that felt like total garbage to play were slowly worked out. Tight corridors were widened, platforming challenges shifted around one block at a time. Enemies increased in number, increased in difficulty, positioned differently until something finally clicked. Fun ...

Goodbye, DnD! This was the last map I was obligated to make for tabletop games, this time including an annotation map and some form of art direction. Unfortunately, due to time constraints coming in from other classes, I couldn't make the best out of the art that I chose. It'd be an easy fix to improve it next time.  I came at this level with the understanding that enemies would have to be way more lethal than they were last time. I was already not impressed with the softballs I was throwing at the party already; and now they were going to have checkpoints; this is practically an invitation to kill players. I am relatively proud to say that of the three games my group played, mine was the only one where a player died and even then I felt like I did too little. I was hoping for every checkpoint placed to be used and I only had 1/3 used in total.  In general, I had to drastically change my approach to level design to accommodate the rule changes, which overall demand more from t...