Tim and I had a meeting on the level themes and we had the conclusion that our level theme will be divided into 2 types, one is inside the kitchen area and the other is outside the kitchen area. Based on that, we had these 6 levels (actually there were 7, but I didn't write the 7th down immediately when the idea came to my mind and I can't remember that now... so we have to think of another instead)
Levels
Kitchen area:
[cube] Classic level (in the kitchen, with a little water and some vertical elements
[Rectangle] Refrigerator (vertical level)
[Sphere] Water level (with ice - fast movement)
[Sphere] Air level (Some solid platforms combine with some shaking ones)
Non-kitchen area:
Farmers' market (where a dog may take away fruits, people and carts are moving, consider areas where huge human (NPC) may slip and fall on the ground and stand up again after a few seconds)
Workshop assembly line (with conveyor belts and automatic robotic arms grabbing fruits)
After that, we decided on the division of work, that is we are going to design the classic level together as that's the one we are going to show for the prototype. I'm responsible for designing the refrigerator level, the water level and the farmer's market level as these themes are originally brought by me while Tim is responsible for the rest 3 levels as he came up with the ideas. We plan to do individual designs first on the other 6 levels so that when we together start to design the prototype level, we will have better skills and understanding.
New Ideas On Level Mechanics
One night, when I was waiting at the bus stop to go back home, I again started thinking of our levels and suddenly an idea came up to my mind:
'What if our game world can rotate during the game?'
This idea soonly gave me excitement and I kept thinking about that for a while. In my mind, for instance, inside the game (a cube world), players were fighting and when the game time comes to 3 minutes, the whole game world starts to rotate 90 degrees to a random side. As there are many platforms and objects on each side, players will have a new experience after this rotation. Some might take the chance to shoot others while some might ram into others after the rotation since all the characters have gravity, if there are no platforms under their feet then they will fall.
Quickly, I introduced this new idea to Tim. After consideration, he said we can try this, it can be fun. Then we continue discussed on the mechanic and we all agreed that we can have different shapes for the levels (cubes, rectangles, spheres or even irregular shapes).
Another good point about this rotation idea is that it can automatically make the juice that falls on the ground on the previous side disappear. In other words, players will get a brand new clean playground after the world rotates.
Another idea bumped into my mind when I was about to arrive home, which is we can have a short animation before the game starts(a few seconds), showing the players a little background story. For example, showing a chef cooking dishes. He holds a pan and a kitchen shovel, then the camera will zoom in on the vegetables in his pan, for instance, one cubed potato. The camera continues to zoom inside the potato and that's where the game scene is displayed, inside a cubed potato! Once this short animation is added into the game, the rotation of the game world makes more sense due to when the chef stirs fry vegetables with a shovel, all the food in the pan will rotate!
illustration from Pinterest
Image Reference:
https://pin.it/1LE4dDp
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