The level design of The Loop
In this page you can follow my process of crafting an immersive and cohesive game.
From the ship and hub station tying everything together to the isolate world of The Loop.
A home away from home
Designing the player ship
The player ship will be a very central part of the project, connecting many elements together and bring structure to the game. It's onboard the ship that systems like the armory, upgrade station and mission select/level loading will take place. I can't stress enough the importance of having a well designed ship/hub that the player enjoys spending time in. When navigating through an area they are meant to frequently come back to starts feeling like a chore, the retention rate will fall off.
I want the ship to feel as a home you want to spend time in and make it your own, providing the player with a sense of progression holding gameplay rewards and found decorations. The ship itself will be very useful for controlling the overall pacing of the game, working as a pit stop between laps, giving crucial downtime and change of pace while pushing the story forward. A place to catch a break in and a natural start and end point of each play session.
Creating the layout of the ship
I began with listing the necessary components needed for the ship and how they would affect one and another in combination with which ones who needs to be in close proximity to eachother. With the help of the 2D paper design I made a blockout of the ship layout to get a feel for the space, the time to walk from room to room, headspace and accessablility using my metrics. The ship needs to be compact to prevent navigating it feeling tedious while still have enough spare room to house secrets, additional story elements, worldbuilding, diegetic systems and decorations.
I have a few iterations that feels like a good starting point to build on. But the design of the ship is an iterative process to make it feel just right it will need a lot of playtesting to reach that level of quality.
Necessary components for the ship:
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Cockpit
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Navigation deck
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Boarding pods
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Docking module
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Personal quarter
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Armory
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Suit upgrade room
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Med bay
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Cargo hold
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Core room/engingeering
A few things to have in mind for the layout:
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The nav deck, armory and the boarding pods needs to be in proximity of one and another
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The walking distance between the cargo hold and upgrade station can't be too long to prevent moving objects to feel tedious
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Make sure the boarding pods and docking modules aren't blocked by the exterior
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Have room to make dynamic changes affecting the story and theme
Making iterations to the ship
After choosing a layout to use I tried walking around in it, I came to the conclussion that three stories felt too much. The second iteration feels a lot better when going from room to room.
Interior/exterior pass
A little bit of assymmetry was needed to help create a mental map of the ship.
Moving the stairs helped with both remembering the areas and open up more space in the lower level. In addition to this, different doors will help a lot instead of using the exact same frame.
Current issues
The ship feels a little bit too exclusive at the moment with the wide hallways. I want to achieve a more compact feel. Tighten up the areas will invoke a more working class kind of feeling. Though this is a good starting point for playstest. When decorations and props are added, it might change that feeling.
Video below is the first walkthrough of the second iterations.
Gradually exposing you to the world
Crafting a multi purpose mission
The first act of the first mission is blocked out by using key moments. This act gradually exposes you to the world of the game while organically teaching you the fundamental movement mechanics.
The mission is layed out with backtracing in mind since the player will need to return back to the boarding pod. The other big challenge is that the station will later on serve as the hub for the game. So the distance from the main area to the boarding pod needs to be short and accessable to not become tedious to go through later. So the first mission is build around these two points, which gives some great opportunities to foreshadow both lifeforms and areas and begin to build familiarity.
Beats for Act 1 of the mission
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Arriving by docking
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Soft station reveal
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Room for conversation
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Go through active station security measures
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Raises questions
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Departure hall
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Sense of urgency
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Revealing the hub behind glass
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Creating the memory
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Detour - Elevator shaft
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Teaching movement mechanics while foreshadowing lifeforms and inflict tension
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Find the way around by going through the depot
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Wrapping up the soft tutorial
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Blocking out key moments
Arriving
This segment has been a bit tricky to nail down. The area should provide enough room for exposition while limit the distance between the pod and the hub area.
I looked a lot at references from airports to create an intuative and natural flow between the two key moments while keep it from being too flat.
Even in this early sections of the act it's important to have the moment to moment gameplay in mind for a solid onboarding.
Raise questions
By giving the station a bit of life we can start to build on the mystery presented to the player. An implicit way of portraying the story.
Why is the station active?
Animated parts of the environment is more visually engaging and mixes up the minute to minute gameplay
Create tension
To guide the player around the hub area I utilize scripted events to block of the main portal and switch their attention to the well composed critical path. Allowing us to motivate the player to move around and find new perspectives. The station is in a bad shape, so by showing decay and simulating heavy vibrations we inflict a good bit of tension and a sense of urgency to the experience.
Soft tutorial
I use this act to teach the fundamental movement mechanics in a straight forward way. By weaving together the main movement mechanics in to the story.
Using a consistent visual language and well tested affordances to communicate to the player how to approach different situations.
The video showcases the end of the first act. The area introduces crawl spaces which emphasizes on exploration which slows down the pacing.
Finding the soul
Initially had a bit of an issue of finding the soul of the station. Needed a consistent direction across all moments and corridors.
Looked at airports for the paper design layout to create a flow of the station that could be both efficient and familiar to navigate.
More about act 2 coming soon!