The Tutorial Level - Monika

[Monika] The levels in the game were created in collaboration between me and Paul. Paul planned the layout and made a basic greybox while I did the final one. The tutorial level went through quite a few changes before it became what it is now. The biggest one I guess was the fact that the whole level was one giant continuous piece. Previously we, the team, had discussed that we wanted to make the levels in small segments so we could easily add or remove them without breaking the whole thing. Some teachers questioned our decisions at the time such as why we made it in pieces and why we had the 'fade to black' feature. A common argument was that this is very 'last gen'. But I'd like to argue about that.

What is 'last gen', 'current gen', 'next gen' and how does it relate to a small inexperienced team like us? We do what we can. What the teachers suggested that they expect from us, 'next gen' or whatever is impossible for us. 'Next gen' or 'AAA' is when you have a huge team with years and years of experience and the resources and time to spend a couple of years on a game. We don't have any of that. But it doesn't mean that we can't produce something good. I see ourselves as a small indie team. And what I like about indie is that indie does what indie wants. 'Gens' don't matter. Your game may be jumping squares or simple pixels and still sell millions and be on top of the charts. So please no one talk to me about generations or whatever. A good game is a good game. I still play my PS1 games and I think they're perfect the way they are, flawless and brilliant, despite being 'last gen' and the fact that 'next gen' games use 50 shaders to make them pretty-pretty and shiny-shiny.

Anyway. My point is that we are all making conscious decisions here. For those who don't get why the pieces and fading to black, here's why:

Fade to black indicates distance travelled and time passed. It's used in the cases when a character is transported from one place to another without having to physically walk the distance. It's a transition that is used in film as well. It's an illusion that the character has covered a long distance without having the player sit there for half an hour, pressing the forward button. And the reason why we want to create that illusion in our game is closely related to the landscape we're trying to portray. A desert, a canyon, both places of endless sand and nothing for miles and miles. One could walk for days in a desert without a single change in the scenery. But of course this is a game and we don't want to make the player actually have to do that. No games do. Even open world games offer alternatives such as mounts or teleports to speed up the travel. Or they fill the desert with quests and monsters so you won't be as bored while passing through it. But our game is not an open world game. And we don't want to bore our players by making them go through endless canyons that just look the same and nothing is happening. And as an artist- I don't want to have to create that. We just cut to the fun bits. The bits with puzzles and pretty views~ But at the same time, we don't want our world to feel small. We don't want things too close together. And that's why, we use the 'fade to black'. It makes the world feel bigger when the levels are actually not.

Another idea that we ended up cutting down because it was too 'last gen' was the fixed camera. I was personally a bit disappointed by that because I thought we could be quite creative with it and have a different feel for the game, but oh well. Nevermind. I won't discuss that here.

Moving on. Me and Paul decided to split the tutorial area into 4 pieces- one for each 'event'.

• The 'push' or 'bridge' area where you have to push a block to create a bridge because the real one collapsed before your eyes.
• The 'sand' area where you need to solve a puzzle to make the sand in the pit rise and allow you to cross over to the next section
• The 'climbing area' which goes up and teaches you all the climbing mechanics in the game
• The 'spiral area' which just spirals up and creates a view and also teaches you to jump and leads you to the exit from the canyons and marks the end of the tutorial.

I took Paul's floor plans and added walls. I wasn't so sure what style we were going for yet and if I was going to be able to manage it so I used this chance to experiment with it a lot. I made different kinds of walls, tried different ways to do the paths and platforms and by the end of this tedious process, I had a pretty good idea how I was supposed to do the real thing.

The hardest one to do was the climbing area. That one went through several design changes first until we decided to make it spiral up the way it does now and exit to the side. We had different ideas for the secret area as well until finally, this one was sort of naturally formed and we decided to keep it.