PurgatoryPurgers

What Should a Level Look Like?

In my last post, I solved a major collaboration issue by figuring out how to export/import individual rooms in GameMaker Studio 2.

Since then, Eric and I have been creating levels to round out the game, and with a little over an hour’s worth of content, I’ve been looking at some of the larger levels to see which parts I can cull so that the game doesn’t get dull/outstay it’s welcome.

Level design is difficult to do well. Purgatory Purgers’ level elements can be broken down into a few different components:

Features

At its heart, Purgatory Purgers is a puzzle-exploration game. Each level is a series of interconnected rooms of varying shapes and sizes and could include:

Gambits: Rooms with one or more dangerous enemies
Treasure Rooms: Filled with lost souls (the primary objective of the game/scoring system) and free lives
Puzzles: Moveable blocks, bridges, etc.
Secrets: Hidden rooms and passages marked by a small crack in the floor or an odd-looking bush.

These aren’t mutually exclusive and could be combined to form interesting and progressively more challenging areas.

Flow

A good level shouldn’t railroad the player down a specific route; instead, there should be 2-3 branching paths and reward players for exploration with additional lives and/or hidden shortcuts through the level.

Embellishments

To bring the Purgatory Purgers levels to life, I created lots of additional tiles to add flavor and mystery to each set of levels. Locked doors, sewer grates, pools of water, grass, grates, blood spatters, arcane symbols, and even emptiness in the later levels.

Putting It All Together

A good level combines all of the above to form a cohesive package; the level is:

Good looking (i.e., makes good use of the available tileset and avoids excessive repetition)
Intuitive to navigate (it doesn’t require a lot of backtracking)
Sufficiently diverse in enemies, puzzles, and mechanics
Above all, fun to play (read: sufficiently challenging, but not too difficult)

Background

In past projects, I controlled music using the room creation code, e.g.:

audio_stop_all(); audio_play_sound(snd_music1,100,true);

This would stop all previously playing audio and start the new music track, looping it until the next room was created.

Functionally, this works fine, but I wanted a more centralized way of handling this so that if I wanted to make a change, I didn’t have to do it N number of places, equal to the number of rooms I created.

How It Works

I created an object called “obj_sound” and placed it in the first room, then I flagged it as ‘Persistent’ so that it would carry forward from room to room.

I added a Room Start event with the following code:

if room==rm_level1 { audio_play_sound(snd_lvl1,100,true); } if room==rm_level2 { audio_play_sound(snd_lvl2,100,true); }

At the start of the room, it checks to see if the name of the room matches “rm_level1” (the name of the first room/level), and if it does, it plays the sound “snd_lvl1” at a priority of “100”, and sets looping to “true.”

Once that was working, we needed to be able to stop the previous music track before loading the next one. This can be done using a Room End event:

audio_stop_all();

This stops all audio before the next room is loaded, preventing tracks from playing over each other.

Tag: PurgatoryPurgers