How To Level Design in 2D Platformers - Devlog 6

i'm making a video game last time i decided on a name finally last time i had decided on a name thought i'd just reiterate that point okay let's talk game design but first the jump and double jump particles weren't behaving themselves so i've locked them in the vault of things i tried once and then decided i didn't want any more remember folks unlike a puppy platform mechanics are not for life they can in fact just be for christmas instead we have this nifty new jump or the orbit jumping i suppose it's simple clean and does what i tell it to do so it can stay just like my girlfriend i'm kidding we have a very healthy relationship like a mad scientist i've gone right down to the core and changed the very nature of jumping itself when you run off a ledge there's now a three frame grace period where you can still jump as if you were standing on the ground this is in line with adding player bias and giving the player more leniency than they think they have this will tie into the way we go on to do difficulty and goes back to something i said in my first ever video about how players aren't actually as good as they think they are speaking of player bias i've made a change that many of you probably didn't even realize wasn't already a thing sliding down a wall will now reset your jump counter so you can go from a wall jump into a double jump this gives the player even more mobility options and another way of saving themselves if they make a mistake again player bias but putting stuff like this in means i can make the later levels as hard as i want and frankly if the player can't beat them i did everything i could also on wall jumps i've added my subtle squash and stretch to wall jumping because apparently we didn't have that before whoops over the course of this series i've had a few comments about the springs and the jelly floors about how to improve the spring's visibility in its function and honestly it's bothered me since day one i was just never bothered enough to fix it until now so we fixed it the spring now does what you expect a spring to do namely shoots you up higher than a regular jump from which you can then double jump for even more height i had a comment about how the spring needed some kind of visible reaction to being sprung on and believe it or not it always has the problem is because the level is often scrolling vertically the vertical scroll negated the fact that the spring dropped when you bounced on it so you wouldn't really notice so to get around that i made the spring squash in and then stretch out again the jelly floor can now stay exactly as it is now that the spring has new parameters the jelly floor has become unique without having to do anything at all a bit like that kid in a group project who just sort of turns up while everybody else does all the work and then he gets an a at the end this also means that level one the level i painstakingly explained in the last video needs completely and entirely redoing this is fine i was planning on it anyway and like i've always said everything is subject to change i got a comment about float mode asking for super saiyan spiky effects okay i still wasn't convinced though and float mode was starting to give me a headache which if you've seen the previous videos you know i've been struggling with it then i got a tweet from a very talented game designer friend saying i should just rename it ghost mode desaturate the level and add some tv static and then i got annoyed because not only did he say that like it was the most obvious thing in the world but as soon as i read it i realized it is in fact the most obvious thing in the world so ghost mode this is it this is where i'm stopping with it it looks cool it's implemented it works job done finally i got another comment saying that i was putting a lot of faith in people already knowing how platformers work and that's true i was i thought i was okay to do that because of the audience that i'm targeting this app but then i thought what if there's a better way so introducing [Music] the playground is sort of like a tutorial level and then it briefly mentions how certain mechanics work but it doesn't ask the player to actually do those things you can run straight to the exit if you want but it'll give you a space to just get used to the mechanics and the physics before the game starts on selecting a new game you'll automatically be sent to the playground first if you don't need it that's fine you can run to the exit in about 10 seconds and it will never be forced on you again but i think some people might benefit from having the space to play around in i'll still be reinforcing certain things in the levels themselves but i don't think it hurts to have a blank space for the player to experiment and acclimatise to the movement physics this is something that 3d platformers particularly super mario often accomplish in their hub worlds vertical levels up until now every level has been horizontal scrolling from left to right with the new vertical level layout we can have a level that goes from the top down or from the bottom up this means when designing a level from scratch we now have three different directions to choose from up right and down not left never left don't ask me why but traditional platformers just don't really move left unless they've moved right up or down first i can't trace this to anything solid but i think it might have something to do with games like pitfall and of course super mario brothers setting the standard for what a linear 2d platformer is metroidvanias don't suffer from this of course and you can go in whatever direction you like but if you're making a linear scrolling 2d platformer you can't primarily be going left because we're all monkey brained in meat suits and it just feels wrong right since every waking moment now is spent on level design i should probably start breaking it down into manageable chunks for you so that my obsessive rambling over where to put one particular platform makes some more sense let's start with a [Music] before you start designing levels for a 2d platformer you need to have your mechanics set in stone it's like trying to build a piece of ikea furniture there's no point putting bits together until you know what all the bits are because if you get that wrong you'll be on the phone to customer support for 90 minutes trying to get a missing screw for your cavist bro or you'll feel like you've finished and wonder why your article store looks like bumblebee your mechanics will guide your level design so you need to have a thorough understanding of what they let you do for example in a previous video we covered why having a double jump needs you to design around a double jump and just putting in taller walls and wider pits is a waste of time your levels need to have opportunities for the double jump to be mastered by the player like this little set piece here now i'm not going to break this down too much because i believe you're all intelligent analytical and just sheer brilliant people please subscribe to my channel but you can see from the background trail the points at which the player has to utilize their mastery of the double jump to pass the challenge this is a challenge that wouldn't be possible without a double jump because you need to time that jump and steer your momentum at the same time to navigate mid-air hazards if i didn't understand what the double jump lets me do i wouldn't be able to put something like this together because i wouldn't know where the double jump is best applied to create challenge understanding your mechanics lets you design levels that make the most of them it's also the reason why i'm quite rudely ignoring all the comments about a sprint a dash an air dash and any other mechanical suggestions it's not that i don't appreciate those suggestions because i do and i'm thankful for them it's just that i have a pool of level hazards platform and movement mechanics that i'm comfortable with and for every one more that you add your level design needs to become more and more complex to make the most of them otherwise it's a waste and your game becomes an unfocused mess i'll give you an example super mario brothers 3 is in my opinion the best 2d mario game after yoshi's island the reason for this is that the mechanical variety is tied so perfectly to the level designed in every single world mario 3 is a single game that's unified in its aesthetic and themed presentation but if you were to rip away the mario skin that sounds horrifying i'm sorry what you'd actually find underneath is a series of levels that could all be taken from completely different games and the way that nintendo accomplished this was to make sure that whenever a mechanic comes up there's a level to make the most of it in fact one of the most iconic stages in mario 3 has an angry sun that just follows you the entire time they devoted an entire level to this one mechanic because that one mechanic needed an entire level you'll see how the placement of the enemies and hazards along the way influences your ability to deal with this main hazardous mechanic by messing with your positioning and momentum let's have another example have you ever plugged sonic 2 into sonic and knuckles and played through the game as knuckles for my younger audience sonic 2 was made in a bygone age where the announcement of a new sonic game was actually met with excitement and not dread this is emerald hill's own act two laying as knuckles this isn't a screenshot this is a thing that you can actually just do because the level wasn't designed around knuckles mechanics of climbing walls and gliding so we've got a jump a double jump and a wall jump the single jump doesn't need much understanding and we've covered the double jump so let's look at the wall jump what does a wall jump let you do lots of things that's why i added it the first one of these is traversal is just a posh way of saying getting around specifically up and down we're going back to super meat boy again but there are so many levels where your progress relies on being able to jump up the sides of walls in reiterate depending on how close together i place some wall surfaces wall jumping is usually the fastest way of making vertical progress this means when i want to vary the layout positioning and verticality of a level i can use tightly placed walls to let the player basically rock it straight up you'll have to take my word for this but this is incredibly pleasing and satisfying to do it creates immediate momentum and i'll be using it to help control the pacing of levels as i make them which is something we'll touch on in another video i don't know how else to describe this other than breadth but basically a jump from a wall will run further than a standard jump given that you can double jump from either position this means a wall jump will always give you a greater jump distance i'm going to use this sparingly to set up challenging set pieces where the player needs to wall jump first in order to clear an obstacle like in this example in reiterate you can't just cling to the wall and sit still you're constantly sliding downwards because you know gravity i can use this to force the player to act in quick succession adding extra challenge by requiring faster reaction times or multiple examples of well-timed execution in this example i've set up a hazard without a wall jump involved it's easy enough to clear you just wait until the spinning spikes are out of the way and make your jump now let's try that with a wall jump instead here you'll notice that we've now blocked off the simple double jump solution with a wall of spikes which signposts our player to the intended solution of clinging to the wall and executing a wall jump with a double jump across the spiked gap there's two ways they could look to accomplish this either they could add the wall jump into the single fluid movement they need to execute like this or they could cling to the wall and use the double jump to keep resetting their wall position until the time is right to make the leap both of them are valid but one of them clearly looks better than the other oh and there's also a third option which is to forego the wall jump all together fall down the gap here double jump over the spikes and then wall jump up the other side again but this again doesn't look quite as good this by the way is a method of passively training your player to improve when you present them with a challenge that has multiple solutions one of them usually the intended one will look and feel better to do most players will instinctively want to do that and will know when their performance feels sloppy or scrappy this forms the basis of the perfect player philosophy that i touched on in the last video and we'll get into in depth in a future one in fact we're going to go even more in depth as the level design sub series continues but for now hopefully you can see how understanding your mechanics is vital to good level design and how you can analyze a mechanic for all of its possibilities there are probably even more things you can do with wall jumps and i'll highlight them if and when they come up but that's going to do it for this video as always please leave a like if you liked it and subscribe to make sure you don't miss the next episode in the series what i'm going to leave you with today is footage of what not to do in level design just for fun i've put together a concept level made purely out of wall jumps and spikes it's awful it's very bad it's not good it's horribly unfair and it's not going into the final game but you get to see it anyway thank you for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Let's Talk Game Design

Views: 24,342

Keywords: devlog, devlog 1, game development, gamedev, indie developer, indie game, indie game devlog, steam games, 2d platformer, game design, level design, how to make a 2d platformer, how to make a game, platformer design, indie dev, game dev, indie devlog

Id: ce8cum_mnKA

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020