It's Alive...ish

Week 7 just passed and it was fairly light for design, so I also helped out with some art models and picked up some more reference images. The first thing I accomplished was updating a couple Unity levels made from the diagrams of last week. Because of the team's new camera limitation, I rebuilt the level flow of 2 levels to match the new restrictions because the other levels met the new restrictions.

The art assets I did are broken parts of a column for the second level platforming sections. Here are some screenshots of those items.

And so I journey on my grind to complete The Grind.

Post It, Fix It, Technologic

Week 6 came and went so quickly, but I managed to get a good amount done for the team. For this post you guys will actually get some visuals along with a small wall of text so here it goes.

The first thing I worked on this week was recovering from a sickness. All jokes aside I drew out half of the level diagrams (which came out to three total) from the design meeting the previous Friday. Here are those diagrams.

As you can notice, these were quickly put together just to get a feel for the layout and show what functionality we needed for each level. I ended up revising all of the level diagrams to unify the iconography and style as well as help the programmers understand what functionality the design team was looking for in the levels. Here are the revised levels with unified symbols and a legend.

With those completed, I also built some early level prototypes in Unity with primitive Unity Assets to figure out basic metrics in each level. At this point, design team is waiting on Alpha environment assets to start the work of building the actual levels, so that means I may hop over to the art side for a short period to assist in building the assets to minimize design team downtime. All in all, design team finally nailed down our general target play experience through the levels we are designing and developing.

It Begins

So this blog is recording the journey of creating a game.

I am Josef Bell, a senior at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta majoring in Interactive Design and Game Development with a focus on level design.

I am a designer for The Grind, a cooperative/competitive beat 'em up where players are racing to win by leveling up their characters with potions and weapons.

As of right now, I have been working on creating level diagrams and generating basis for weapon statistics (before we do a second pass with a balancing formula). The levels have gone through a bit of evolution since the initial pitch, mainly because the team came to a realization about the scope of our game and how we could reach our goals in the time we have (10 Months) to complete the project. What we decided to do was change the function of how players navigate through levels (from similar rooms with similar doors to unique rooms with portal entrances and exits). The change gave the level designers more variety in level mechanics.

I will be updating this blog weekly to show any updates and materials that I create in the production in the grind to completing The Grind.