Martin Vilches

  The assignment was to create a level with a theme of aliens and a prison break theme. My idea was to create a post-apocalyptic prison where two prisoners tried to escape. The prison would be filled with aliens and locked doors. The doors would be locked, and the players would need to collect the keys to escape the prison. In the level, there would be many doors and a couple of bosses, one at the middle of the playthrough and another at the end. This level is linear; there is only one way of finishing the level. Maybe a semi-linear design would have made it more interesting; however, there would be a chance for the player to get lost and not understand where to go when finishing the level. In my last project, there was an excess of detail in the level design. So in this assignment, I decided to make something more simple. I decided to put more thought into the mechanics and to balance the game to be playable instead of putting heavy detailing.  Playtesting: During the playtes...

  During this last week, we had the chance for the players to re-playtest our level, and I was able to receive more feedback from the playtesters. Most of it was positive feedback. However, there are also many things that can be improved.  There was a positive Reaction to the enemies being more balanced; however, now it turns out they were very weak. So now the players were able to have short fights with the enemies. I tried to solve the too-strong enemies problem by reducing the enemy's defense points to almost none, which made the players have ridiculous damage to the enemies and were able to kill most easy enemies with one turn. What could be improved here would be balancing the defense stat depending on how deep in the dungeon the players are, therefore making the enemies stronger. Another positive reaction was when there was a planned revealing for rooms; this time around I was aware when players were moving, and there weren’t any times in which a player rolled and walk...

This week, we were assigned a group to playtest our simple DND map with a basic rule sheet given to us. The map was meant to be simple and under 20 minutes. They chose the Mage and the Knight characters for their playthrough which was a good combination, both were very strong characters. The playtest went surprisingly well, and there was a lot of feedback given me about what I should change for the map to be more enjoyable. ● What Went Right: The playtesters seemed to really enjoy the map's theme; they were very involved in the choose your own path topic surrounding the map. There were many paths available for them to take and explore. The variety and attention to detail were something they noticed and appreciated, and that showed me that good level design was a pivotal concept to grab the player’s attention. Because there were many paths available for the player to choose from, the players decided to separate to cover more terrain. There were evenly distributed enemies and bosse...