For Hypercore I worked with two programmers to create this "first person platformer collectron". There was alot more to do on my end then just design the game, vast amounts of unit paperwork, powerpoints and other projects took away from the time I could spend here. So now having some free time I can talk about what I would do differently, as they say hind sight is 20/20
In this series of blogs, I will discuss what design philosophies I attempted in hypercore drifter, a microgame I completed at Solent University. I will talk about what I did and what I would do to improve if given another iteration cycle.
For this post, I will be talking about the hub, area 1
o, the hub for HCT is somewhat of a placeholder, in a full game it would be vast-multi level zone, but for this micro project, we kept it self-contained.
Originally I wanted to play with the sense of wonder, have the world feel bigger than the player and discovering each zone is part of the joy
Area 1 is where the player first spawns in, I placed a small incline here. This is because I wanted to avoid overwhelming the player with too much information to take in at once. By limited initially what information the player gets given helps them ease into the play environment. There are spinning coins and a blue pathway to lead the player in the direction I wanted them to go.
Now this scenes capstone would have been a beautiful church Now that I have more experience in whiteboxing I can roughly model and place the roof on here, but it was an unimportant feature at the time as to getting other parts of the game implemented.
These floating platforms were added by one of the programmers. I would move this to a location where such a hard jumping challenge isn't the first thing the players see, and the "majesty" of the hub isn't compromised
I would also slightly change the layout of the entry section, to better reflect the tone I was going for. Using catholic churches as reference and the techniques they used in their layout to make the church feel bigger, hence filling the player with a feeling of wonder and smallness.
To do this I would, as shown above, have the player enter via a shrinking doorway, into a small pit with a dipped ceiling then ascend into the main room.
By having the ceiling squash the player, even just for a moment gives a feeling of claustrophobia, and while this effect could be compounded by having a whole level designed around it, it works here just as a contrast to the open verticalness of the room. This claustrophobia effect is helped even more by restricting players line of sight. By not having a preview to the room, then getting hit by it all at once the overloading of information will imbue the emotional effect even more. This is something I tried to experiment with in this project, and something I want to explore more of going forward.
Having much more central aligning design to the hub too will help with this biblical feeling. With this alternate design with each wing leading off to a new areas, will better help lead the player, each local can be gated off with a number of cores / power ups needed to get to the next area.
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