Jiyuu-More | ronaldvan

Jiyuu (自由)

Research & Planning

For the first half of the project I had the chance to consult with Christopher Orth (Infamous 2, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings) on level design and also planning on what I'm making for the game.
Orth and I discussed some of the key things that level designers would do in their levels to guide players from point to point and what I should be looking into while designing my levels.
The plan was to do something similar to what I made in Rail Runners (one of my past team projects) but with a Mirror's Edge style gameplay where players are feeling the tension of making the jump between sides of different buildings.
I was also interested in a music video from Seeb with their music track called, "Free to Go" so I used that video as an inspiration to the story and art.
The pictures below are some of the planning on paper for the levels of the game and the last picture is my idea of what the game was about in a bigger picture.

First Half of the Work

I was working on the levels without having any layout on paper because I wanted to start iterating to see what worked and what didn't.
I tried to use basic shapes, color, and models to represent the key things that the player would experience in the game.
I tried not to focus too heavily on mechanics due to how long they can take which helped me focus only on the level design.
When working on the factory, I was struggling on the maze portion because I was making something too big and confusing.
I also started making an alternative path to separate levels to make some unique experiences for the player if they ever decide to go to the other door.
The video below is the result of the version of the game that I had by the end of the first half of working on the game.
The key feedback I got from Orth was that I needed to focus on the tiny details in my levels but I was really good at creating the broader strokes of the levels.

Second Half of the Work

My plan was to continue working on this game in my final design class which was a class about polishing some of our old projects.
I felt that the game was missing a lot of player actions so I started adding some mechanics in the game that could help enhance the role of being a robot.
I aimed to make a grapple hook to resemble the robot's arm and then added rotating objects because one of the areas in the level used a flashlight to navigate through it.
I also started adding more to each level and by the halfway point of this second half of my work, I finished laying out all of the baseline level design I needed to do for the rest of the semester.
Around the time of finishing the baseline, the remote work kicked in from the pandemic.
I lost access to Maya for the art stuff I needed to do for the game and my laptop barely managed to build lighting.
During the remote class, we got written feedback for our games from other students so I had to figure out what issues the others had based on only reading.
The project at its final version, in my eyes, is incomplete but it is what I had at the end of the year.
The final version of the game is all the way at the top of this page.

Challenges

The project was worked on in a remote setting where I wasn't able to use the school's computer to quicken my process in building and work on art stuff.
With remote work, I became a lot slower with making final touches for the game.
The slow productivity also hindered the process of adding necessary things like sound effects to each actions or making small changes to make the level better.
The feedback from other classmates was nice but I had no idea what they went through specifically and I have no idea what expression they had on certain parts of the game.

Lessons Learned

With no computer from the school to help me get through the work, I had to settle with only working on the highly important parts of the game rather than the other things to make it better.
Productivity is slowed and it was expected when I lose most of time to building lighting for the project.
In these times with the pandemic, feedback may not be as great but we got to make do with what it is.
I can design levels in great broad strokes but I need to take the time to do better in the details of the game.
I could also adapt to newly added mechanics in the game where the level was able to facilitate the new stuff.
Learned a lot about some of the level design stuff that I hadn't thought about before when working on past projects.