Group project
Game Designer
Level Designer, and Level Design Coordinator

Unity Engine

Consistency and flow between levels is important.
Coordinating between multiple level designers of varying amounts of experience is difficult, but important.

The Design Challenge presented to us was to create a game using an Alternate Controller in just four days. We decided to use a Guitar Hero/Rock Band controller due to its accessibility, but wanted to ensure the player did not perceive the controller as a guitar. The design was to use the physical feedback of flicking the whammy bar to control jumping, and use this to hop through the level. There were some technical issues due to the limitations of the controller (the whammy bar not being sensitive enough), so the game evolved into using the whammy bar to either perform a high jump or a long jump.
Designing levels for the game presented unique challenges, as the only action available to the player was jumping. I personally created the final level. It was designed as a culminating final challenge, and a soft “end” of the showcase version of the game with players likely not being able to complete the level. A series of small landing platforms and tight jumps with overhangs potentially blocking jump trajectory was used to create the high degree of difficulty called for.
A large amount of my time on the project was spent teaching and organizing the lower year students on our team to allow them to contribute to the level design. After that I went through and reworked the levels they had created for consistency and flow, primarily in regards to difficulty but also to ensure all the levels followed the same standards with map size and camera zoom. For some levels this required a large scale edit, as the map was not of the standard size. The end result was a series of levels that flowed together and gradually increased in difficulty.