Introduction
Hello, IndieDB community !
Welcome to our tenth article of our game: “Bracara Augusta: Shadow of the Past”. Today we are going to talk about our game's level design.
Level Design
For our level design , and as seen previously, we took inspiration from the Roman ruins in Braga. After some researched we found the map of the ruins in some articles.
The ruins that we will be focusing on are: the ones beneath the cafe and the carvalheiras insula (house).
As we said before, the cafe has a glass floor where we can see the ruins bellow, but the glass is very foggy and it has a lot of water droplets.These two elements combined don't allows us to see the ruins very well.
Trough the glass we are able to see some things but it is not enough. To overcome this, the level design is based on the models of the ruins made by the Museum D.Diogo de Sousa.
Image 1: Café glass floor
Image 2: Cafe's ruins model
Image 3: Cafe's ruins map
The other ruins, belonging to the house, are closed to the public. The photos that we were able to get are from some articles and advertisement photos that the city hall takes.
But, has it happened with the cafe's ruins, the house ruins also have a model. Contrary to the other model, this one shows how the house looked originally.
Image 4: Carvalheiras insula ruins map
Image 5: Carvalheiras insula ruins model
For our level design, it was very important to have the most similarities between the ruins and our own underground.
To do so we divided our underground in two parts:The café ruins (red) and the road, and the insula rooms (yellow).
Image 6: Bracara Augusta Level map
We then took the ruins map and tried to adapt it as best as we could to our game's puzzles and space. The general shape is there, but some rooms had to be changed to serve the game's level design and logic.
To summarize, this week we were focused on the game's level design and how we were going to incorporate the ruins in our level map. But it's still not over, we still haven't talked about what lies in our many rooms of our map.
But we will leave that for another article, in the meantime:
