Level Design: Beware of the Blob
Building Interest out of Constraints
The combinatorial nature of crafting new body parts posed the most significant constraint on how levels could be constructed.
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Body parts are what the player actually needs to solve puzzles
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The player needs at least two organs to make a body part
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And organs are gained from hugging human NPCs
These game rules posed significant constraints on where different human NPCs and puzzle pieces could be placed. For example, a Door requires an Arm to open, so the player needs to have access to both a Tissue and a Bone in the area before the Door in order for the player to be able to actually pass through it. This means the player must be able to find a Researcher (for Tissue) and Scientist (for Bone) before the Door. As you can see, the act of putting a Door (or any other puzzle piece) in a level had dramatic consequences for the level layout.
These strict contraints actually led us to a natural pacing for the levels. Since the player starts off each level with no organs, the first part had to involve getting a lay of the land while sneaking around without any tools. This gave us a nice first peak in our engagement curve.
After hugging the NPCs in the area, there is a natural lull in the curve as the gameplay transitions from stealth (as there are no more threats to hide from) to solving the puzzle to get to the next level/part of the level.
Now in this new part of the level, the gameplay transitions back to stealth, but the context is different. The player now has organs, and this changes a lot. The player now has:
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Something to lose when they get captured (the player's organs dropped and they have to run back to regain them)
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Body parts, which give them more options in how they want to approach the more difficult NPCs encounters
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Options on whether they want to hug the rest of the NPCs in the area and then solve the puzzles, or try to multitask and do both at once
From there the pattern can repeat in an escalating manner. I wanted a good crescendo for each level to end on, so I made sure to put the most interesting and revelatory puzzles at the end of each level. This gave the levels a real sense of progression.
Tutorialization
Again, the combinatorial crafting system made this significantly more challenging. We spend a lot of time mulling over the order in which to teach each new mechanic or rule. The first level went through half a dozen iterations until we realized what part of the problem was.
Early on, we had in game posters on the walls that told the player what buttons to press or what some things did. We liked it and playtesters liked it... well, when they noticed them. They had two major problems:
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In a 3rd person game with a free camera, it was entirely possible for players to completely miss key information
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Players weren't sure if they were supposed to look at them since most games don't have diegetic tutorials
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We were spending too much time trying to figure out how to walk line between "not so noticeable that they look like they don't belong in the world" and "don't blend in enough for players to easily ignore them"
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This was made more challenging when we realized that we wanted wall decorations to make the levels feel less sterile; now we needed a way one visually communicating which posters were important to look at and which ones were just for decoration
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Ultimately we realized that our resources were better spend solving other problems, so we instead used tutorial pop-ups triggered by trigger volumes. In testing, we also found out that we only needed to use tutorial pop-ups for communicating controls, all other rules and mechanics were through in game affordances. We were able to preserve the most important elements of the diegetic tutorials, by making the pop-ups not stop gameplay.
It was significantly easier to design around pop-up tutorials since we didn't have to worry about the camera facing in unexpected directions. This allowed us to make a first level that wasn't too long, presented the player with new information in the most logical order possible, and paced the new information so that players could experiment and not be overwhelmed by it all.