Onboarding Pt.3

Sketches

Now I have the step-by-steps for puzzle, at least for Puzzle 1, I managed to transfer the ideal path of the games level design, not so much for the aesthetical reasons but the overall basic look, so for what we have it’s seen to be very simple considering it’s a Super Easy Puzzle for the player to go through, to start the player off, now for the overall game this will probably change and the barrier of difficulty also will change because of the Live Ops. However for the general design, this is the first puzzle in sketches, next thing to do from there was to use the Unity game engine to transfer this knowledge and make placeholders for the developers.

The good thing about the sketches is that even with the it looking like a bad Picasso painting there was still somewhat of a structure to it, finding the correct places for each object in general, like where are the small gaps going to be, where are the enemies and the where’s the exit. Honestly, I can go on.

Unity Onboarding Levels

More importantly is that when I was transferring these sketches into Unity, using ProBuilder and ProGrids is always useful for prototyping stages, and my objective with making these was to gather a general understanding with the whole team as to what needs to go where and how it’s generally going to be presented in the game. Things have been colour coded and so it also has some type of visual indicator.

One thing I did decide literally last minute was to change the general layout for Ranger 1 as most of them in the sketching ideation stage where effectively the same so I didn’t want make it all the same as they are all separate characters that have different needs, so to make the ‘Teleport’ ability to make predominant and memorable there needed to be a significant cut-off.

Now because the Alien has a different set of abilities that are part of the map, they need to find a way to understand all the abilities, so having two doors for Ability to change doors was relevant additionally it was decided the Alien characters aren’t on the ground so the spawn point would also be different from the Rangers. But then what are the key identifiers? Well let’s get into that

Key (How to Identify)

• Dark Yellow/Brown - The player Spawn

• Yellow - Enemies

• Green - Door 1 or the main exit

• Red - Door 2 which normally signifies the 4th ability for the Aliens as they can change the door the Rangers can go through

• Pink - Interactable objects - Ranger 1, a wall to go through, Ranger 2 an object to move and the Alien, the resource collection.

Next Steps

Ultimately, even if these onboarding levels aren’t used for the game, at least they have been designed, I know that with our game there are a few other ways that it could’ve been conducted, however this I felt was a more practical way to understand the complexity of certain mechanics. As the mechanics are fairly unique, it may initially be hard for the player to understand how to play.

However, I know that Speech Bubbles can be used during the first time playing the game but then that would take some more work on the coding side to identify how much time the player has taken to play the game.

Now I would say it’s important to think about the UI screens for the game or at least consider the experience in sketches, I guess it’s time to storyboard the process in-game.