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Post news Report RSS Breeze of Chimes - Designing Our Level

In today's post we will tell you about our level's progress, how we are creating it and the level design philosofies we are using!

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Hey you all!

We are back again, this time we would like to take you all on a journey throughout our level's progress, design and philosofies!

Feel free to comment what you think about it after reading the post! We are eager to hear it!

Our Tutorial!

Our level design has been a complicated task to take on, although we wholeheartedly take on that challenge.

Let us take you through our level design philosophies, starting from the beginning, our tutorial.

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Our Level's Tutorial Area


During the tutorial we want to introduce our main movement mechanics and the concept of empowerment, but we did not want to make this task seem bothersome on the player, so we avoided things like text logs and chose to indicate controls and mechanics in a more intuitive way.

Introducing Empowerment!

As mentioned above we want to introduce players to our game’s concept of empowerment, so since these mechanics are not a particularly common thing in platformers we wanted to introduce them in a very simple way.

So to achieve that we start by presenting no challenge and only requiring the player to use the mechanic to jump over a high wall, effectively giving them an idea of how it works.

This way players who take longer to reach conclusions will not feel pressured or frustrated, and players who are quicker will just simply overcome this obstacle.

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Empowerment Introduction Segment


An experienced player can beat our tutorial in as little as 30 seconds depending on how quickly he adapts, while more casual players can take all the time in the world to beat it since we present no rush or danger in this particular area.

The Game's Hub!

After the tutorial comes our Hub area, a placed that connects to everywhere, in here the player can go into 2 different areas that each provide a different challenge with focus on different mechanics.

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Our Hub Area


The player can tackle either challenge in whatever order they wish to, since the abilities introduced in each area are particular to them.

These 2 areas are the waterfall and wind areas.

The Waterfall Area!

Let’s talk about them from left to right, starting then with the waterfall area, the main focus on this area is our characters ability to use an empowered dash to break certain more fragile terrain, like cracked rocks or old trees.

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Starting segment of the Waterfall Area


The empowered dash covers a lot of ground and feels incredibly satisfying/powerful to use, therefore we believe this area with the right amount of challenge will prove to be a ton of fun!

The Wind Area!

Next up is the wind area, where as the name suggest the main level mechanic here will be wind currents, with varying forces and angles you will have to use these winds to propel you forward or dodge them to avoid losing.

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Wind Area (The Wind right now is represented by those green lines)


Don't mind the yellow Google Maps looking character it is only a placeholder until we get our actual character into the game!!

A bit more challenge!

Both these areas end with a puzzle that will put your newfound abilities to a test, the difficulty will spike up a bit in there so good luck! (We promise we will not make it too hard! But a bit of a challenge is always fun!)

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Wind Puzzle Area


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Waterfall Puzzle Area


The Challenge for us, the Devs

Since our character as so much freedom of movement we must find new intuitive and non-cumbersome ways of countering that, otherwise our game would end up having 0 challenge which is not something we want.

These mechanics are still in development and we will talk about them soon enough!

Social Medias:

If you wish to contact us/interact in any way feel free to either follow us on twitter our e-mail us!

Twitter: twitter.com/HopokiStudio

E-Mail: hopokistudio@gmail.com

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