The Design of V017AGE.

Hey all, it's Gavin, the Lead game and Level designer for V017AGE.

I just wanted to give you guys some insight into the future, the design philosophy, and the goal of this project, as well as some context as to how the game came to fruition. 

The Context: Everyone involved in this project are students of Bradley University and this project was made as a result of one of our classes. The point of the class is to simulate a small-scale professional work environment and V017AGE is the game we are working on for the remainder of the semester.  We work on this project weekly from August 2022 to December and have expected milestones to be completed as per the class guidelines. 

The Design: Tasked with being the lead game designer, platformers are not typically my go-to genre. I admittedly have only played a few and is a genre I typically just don't gravitate towards. Despite this, I find inspirations in other, far different genres and am hoping to apply such inspirations in this project. When going into thinking about V017AGE I had a couple of goals in mind: Multiple and expressive ways to complete each level, satisfying and good-feeling moments, replayability, and show-not-tell design. 

• -Multiple and expressive ways to complete each level: When thinking about level design I instantly was brought to two of some of my biggest inspirations, the Deus Ex series, and Halo. These games, though far different genres, embrace creative and expressive ways for players to approach interactions. Thing is, these games are far larger budgets and far larger games (they literally are 3D) and so doing such design is more natural to their mediums. Still, I sought to find ways to balance puzzle and parkour interaction in such a way that players feel that in a vast majority of interactions they can discover satisfying ways to complete levels. For example, in Alpha 0.1 of our game, the player can either use their mobility and dexterity skills to complete the level or use the gravity gun to find more clever and puzzle-like ways to maneuver (Using the purple box to avoid spikes and the vertical section).  As the game is further developed and more interactions are possible, this will expand and hopefully allow for a more unique platformer experience. 

• - Satisfying and Good-feeling moments: Similar to the above point, we hope to make these interactions feel really good. Players should feel rewarded for either being skillful in their movement or in their decision-making and so things such as Challenge Rooms and making sure that each avenue of completion is worthwhile and provides their own flavor of fun. 

• -Replayability: Levels will have a star rating and a challenge level chip that can be obtained. Levels having multiple ways to approach them also will levy into replayability more viable. We want to reward players for trying new ways to play or perfecting their craft and such systems are aimed to aid in this. 

• -Show-Not-Tell-Design: Personally, I despise when games explicitly tell me what to do in games. A strong tutorial is one that you don't even know is teaching you the game.  Through clever and intuitive level design as well as diagetic means of displaying important information, we hope to create an experience where players little feel like they are being directed or taught but rather are able to naturally understand where they can go and how they may be able to approach challenges. Using things such as colors, elevation, camera placement, and other various physical queues, levels should feel naturally approachable even when seeming daunting. 

The Goal: The goal of V017AGE overall is to give everyone involved some more real-to-life industry experience for a class project. We aim to make this game be very good for the time and conditions it's being made in, and just want to make this an expression of what we have learned so far. We do not really plan to monetize this but hope to make something that resonates with people strong enough that they had fun. We look at flash games for inspiration here greatly and want to create a digestible experience akin to that era. 

The Future: We aim for V017AGE to have multiple levels that are relatively decent in size. While this project is likely to be finished at the end of the year for the school project, it is possible we may continue to work on it if things go well enough or if we begin to realize the game more. 

So yeah, that's really all I got to say about the game right now. It's still early in development but we hope that it really rounds out to be something great. Thank you for reading this and having an interest in our project.