Level Design in Heibai

Hello! I'm Adam, the lead game designer for Heibai. This week, I'm going to give a brief overview of how the design principles for Heibai's level design were laid out early on in the game's develop and how I used those principles to make the levels in the game.

From the beginning, we aimed to make Heibai a minimalist game in both its art direction and mechanics. Being a casual platformer with only ten levels, this meant we couldn't diversify the types of platforms we had spread around the game and so we decided having one type of platform to stand on and one type of platform to kill you would be enough for ten levels (this changed later on when we included the walls, but that's a discussion for another time). It was my job to create the layouts of each level in the game. 

When I started this I used our test levels as a basis for the first level as they were a simple series of short jumps made to test the movement and I knew that this layout would allow players to get used to the movement in the same way it had done for myself. I stuck with this level, and levels two and three, for a while as I knew that fleshing out these levels would allow me to develop an understanding of what could and couldn't be done when designing layouts for levels - how far apart the platforms could be, how high up they could be, if you could spawn platforms beneath or above you and still land on them in time, etc. This era of testing formed the principles of design I applied going forward into later levels, which could be summarised as follows:

1. You have to be able to land in the centre of the platform you're aiming for.
2. The player shouldn't be able to accidentally hit their head on platforms above themselves.
3. Jumps which interact with a bucket must have the arc of the jump clearly telegraphed by the placement of the bucket at the arc's peak.

These principles ensured that the jumps never felt frustrating to reach and that the game felt casual to play. The first and second principles ensured I made jumps which weren't hard to complete while the second and third principles ensured I critically thought about how bucket placement influenced the flow of the levels. There are, of course, exceptions to these rules but I always ensured, as best I could, that the exceptions were clearly and plainly obvious to the player, such as the jump on level nine where you deliberately bump your head on a ceiling in a tight jump to clear the gap. That's a quick overview of the level design principles of Heibai! Thank you for reading and look forward to more in the next coming days!