Introduction

Wrath is a Shoot'em'Up game. The game was made in C++ and Levels edited in Tiled. The player will need to finish 6 levels with 12 Unique bosses. You can play as 2 different ships

Working as a game and Level Designer

Wrath was the first game that I could prove myself as a Level designer. In the previous project that was a point and click I was limited as a Level designer but in Wrath, I had the potential to make interesting levels. 

The work as a level designer in a Shoot'Em up was one of the best experiences I've had doing design during my time on The Game Assembly. I started out by setting the game design and the basics of the player and the enemies. Our group was going big from the start so I and my Level Design Colleague got 3 levels each to work with. 

In the game and enemies that we were placed, there were 2 basic variables that we used. The first was a movement pattern: how the enemy was moving, and the second was a bullet pattern: how the bullets were moving. By using these two variables we could place enemies with lots of different combinations, after this the programmers also added custom speeds and damage from the different patterns, making it even more fun to place enemies. 

The Level design was simple. You traveled sideways and shot enemies to get high-score. In the middle of the map you faced a mini-boss and at the end of each level you faced off with bosses. 

Making the levels

We made all the levels in Tiled a program that is used to make 2D levels. As designers in tiled, we had to put in both the scrolling background and all the enemies and test it in comparison to how it was in the engine. So the metrics did not always add up, and we had to test this out every time we placed new enemies.

I and my colleague worked close to each other to help make the player understand what kind of enemy used a certain kind of pattern. And from play-testing with our group and outside our group we got good feedback on this continuing this til our project was finished. 

Closing Thoughts

As I said before our group was very excited for this project and we wanted to add a lot of features to the project. We all wanted to add the features but in the end, there were issues concerning this. We had a skill-tree we had 6 levels with 12 Unique bosses and a never-ending level. In the end, I think we suffered as a group from this with crunch and playtesting etc on the weekends we worked too much. Now when I look back a year after the project was finished I would cut away some things just to make the workload lower and add more time to pure polish. 

In the end, I think this is one of my best projects. Together with Ulv, we got a nice grade and a good review from other students. It was fun to work with and everyone in the group really cared about the project.