Communication Lab 13
Composite Challenges

The focus of today's lab is to continue the level design work that you did in a previous communication lab. In that previous lab, you identified building blocks (also known as design patterns) for your level design. Now it is time to put these together into a single level. While you will not turn anything for a grade, we be holding a critique session this Friday to review your work.

Once again you should be doing this design activity in Discord, sharing your screens while someone sketches out the level (or you alternate sketching the levels). The TAs will check in with your channels, occassionally giving their own feedback on your discussion. If anything is unclear about this assignment, or the document in general, please ask them. They have been through this process before (some of the TAs have done this multiple times).

Lab Format

If you are unhappy with your building blocks from the previous communication lab, feel free to spend the first part of the class coming up with a few more.

However, we want you to spend the majority of the class time creating an interesting level. You can do this by arranging your building blocks in a sequence. With that said, the best design takes place when you can combine building blocks together simultaneously. We gave several examples of this in commercial genres in the previous lab.

That is all we have to say -- make a level. To give you some idea of what to do, here are some examples from previous semesters.

Aphelion

Another popular game from the Spring 2016 Showcase, Aphelion was a puzzle game that consisted of a large number of challenging levels. This document is longer than some of the others, so be sure to look at others besides this one for guidance. Despite its length, it still maintains clarity without overload. In particular, they do an excellent job of identifying complex patterns and incorporating them into their game.

Arcane Tectonics

Winner of Most Innovative (Mobile) Game in the Spring 2018 Showcase, Arcane Techntonics crafted a very strong Level Design Philosophy, which allowed them to pull apart their levels to their most discrete pieces. The progression of level difficulty is particularly well-represented in their write-up.

Coalide

The mobile audience favorite at Spring 2018 Showcase, Coalide has a level design document that is an exercise in clarity and brevity. Notice how the logic builds with each step, and the thinking behind each level decision is explained.