The Level Design of The Golem Game

Today I’m going to be talking about my thoughts upon creating the level for our game, The Great Golem.

Finding the right theme

To start let’s go back a month ago when I first tried to develop the level. My first thought was what kind of theme do we want for our game. We needed something that made sense and would fit the models, buildings and details that we had, so silly options like the interior of a volcano or the bottom of the ocean would not work. For us the best option we determined was a mountain range which added depth to the scene and made it feel less like you are just a plane in the middle of an empty space.

Level Layout

So now we have a location to work with now it is time for design the level layout. The first thing I wanted was to ensure some feel of level progression, so rather than throwing the player into a pit of death they get to understand the game and just have fun with it and later have the game get a little more challenging. First off in the tutorial section we started off with a couple homes a couple houses and a couple walls for the player to destroy. We then introduced some enemies that will attack the player and then teach the player how to regain health by eating his minions.

Sieging the Castle

Now we need to determine how the rest of the map should look and play. Once again, we needed to go with something that fit our theme and models, so our best choice was to create a castle-like structure, this gave us the opportunity to overload a section with a lot homes and towers. After the castle has been built and the homes have been added it’s time to add the enemies into the game.

Bad Guys and Progression

So after the tutorial level where the player learns the mechanics of the game I started off by placing one enemy on the outskirts and a bunch of homes around to draw the player into that section and repeated it until they arrived at a larger building which was used to refill a special token. From there the player should know what they can do we can start to up the number of enemies to 2, and it continues to increment to where you could potentially be hit by 6 enemies all at once. I decided to make the castle a very clustered section with many homes, many enemies and many opportunities to deal damage and take damage. Lastly we had some extra space on the sides of the castle so we added some trees to block off specific pathways so the player can't just walk around it