This is the Only Level 3 has released! And with it, Tass made a video about the project!
Like in This is the Only Level 2, buddy and Flash game guru Tasselfoot worked on level design for the project. It’s a fun challenge; it’s game programming meets challenging level design, and there’s fun give and take from both sides. It’s satisfying, difficult, and more or less pizza-filled. Tass made a video of his experience making the game (runtime 32 minutes):
This post was written by John on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012. He has 488 posts on this blog.
Tags: elephant, this is the only level
This is the Only Level 3 is a collaboration between Tasselfoot, myself, and Jimp. Tass has been asking me for months (years?) if we can make a third and after much thought we finally got to work! Here it is, and I hope you enjoy!
This post was written by John on Friday, December 30th, 2011. He has 488 posts on this blog.
Tags: elephant, this is the only level
Game development is so much fun sometimes. A lot of times it’s a monster rearing its ugly head, but recently I had an opportunity to make This is the Only Level Too, which quite possibly was the most rewarding game development experience I have had of late.
If unfamiliar to the game, its a game about playing the same level over and over again in various forms. In the first level you may have to push a button to open the door, but in the second pass of the level you’ll have to drag the door open with your mouse. Each time the level changes just enough within the level design to create a different experience 30 times over for 30 stages.
I worked on this project with a hardcore Flash gamer Tasselfoot, who is maybe better known for making walkthrough videos for various Flash websites and managing the community of the late Flash Flash Revolution. His position in this project was level design and testing. I’ll give myself enough credit as to say I was fairly involved in level design as well but it was really his initiative and design that rolled this project along. I did the programming and the artwork, as well as porting my own homebrew tile engine to Actionscript 3 finally (its been missing in action for a while).
We met in Irvine, CA one day for a grinding section of brainstorming and level design. Tass came with a general level design (as seen at the top of the post) and together we came up with a good 30 stages.
Post-it Notes are really good for laying out level ideas, and the more and more we looked at each of the levels and progression we got closer and closer to nailing down level design.
It’s a back and forth though. Some level schemes break other level schemes which means levels are incompatible with each other. These have to reach compromise or be forfeited. Luckily we managed to find a median for most level choices. Levels such as the Ice Level (move in one direction until you hit a wall) nearly dictated the entire design (but we just HAD to have it).
One choice we made was to list all the level design on Google Docs. With Google Docs you can share information between multiple individuals quite easily. Since Tass wasn’t onsite for most of the project it was essential that we had a central meeting point to list notes and level progress. It’s amazing how much incentive to finish a few more levels before the end of the day comes out of simple colour coding of spreadsheet squares. I was printing out spreadsheets every day to see what my day was shaping up to be.
Tass was constantly testing and providing feedback while I coded, which is different than what I am used to. Usually it’s a an unaided experience until the last few moments of the project, in which I start getting feedback before features get locked down. It’s a whole different experience when you are constantly working with a game tester.
There was plenty of research too. I ran a poll on the website to see who knew what “Sticky Keys” were just to make sure levels were easily understood. We have an alphabet-based level too, and we went into keyboard layouts to make sure that a good majority of the players could hit the keys for that level (or at least replicate them).
One of the more interesting things are the levels we decided NOT to include. We had planned a Left Gravity level but I decided to nix it towards the end of the project. Some ideas sound really good on paper but once you realize you have to rewrite your entire character jumping and interaction script it becomes a deadly time sink. Another level that was modified was the “Rembrandt” level, which we instead went with a fingerpainting-style art (I thought it looked better). We even had a brown-bag artwork choice for that level that was never implemented.
There are so many tile types in this game. In the first game every tile functioned the same, but in this game we had a lot of features that relied on changing tile types. If you’ve played through the game you’ll probably be able to relate all these tiles to those levels. This was an easy reason why this game took so much longer to produce than its predecessor.
In the end we ended up with a solid 30 stages inside the one level design.
Once again, it was a fun project because its fun level design and programming. It’s like taking a VW Bug and adding more and more random accessories to it until it has everything including an ejector seat. I appreciate Tass’s enthusiasm to help me finish the project and work on it with me and I appreciate the warm reception the project has received.
This post was written by John on Thursday, February 18th, 2010. He has 488 posts on this blog.
Tags: tasselfoot, this is the only level, titol 2
This post was written by John on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010. He has 488 posts on this blog.
Tags: this is the only level, tinyphant
Had an interesting day yesterday. The game This is the Only Level managed to get popular on Digg so there was a huge influx of walkthrough video traffic reported from the walkthrough creator, Tasselfoot.
For some reason Armor Games is near impossible to get the article Dugg on, I’m not sure why. It got Dugg on another website.
I went running today at lunch with Dan from the Armor Games office but got super tired from the super hot temperatures outside. I had to walk home even though it was only a 4-5 mile run.
My computer is down to about 11 MB in hard drive space. It’s true, and it’s sad for me because I can’t take pictures with it being so low. I am going to either have to crack down and get a new computer (the fun, more expensive option) or find a way to use an external hard drive for the photo editing (the less fun, much slower option). I have a Macbook so its not the easiest thing to upgrade, and I use a single Aperture database that is near 50 GB and resides as a single file. So I might lose the home laptop for a desktop replacement and do photo editing on a proper monitor and faster computer. I’m thinking an iMac, since Aperture is Mac only and my photo tool of choice. Otherwise, I’m going to RAID 0 some 1 TB external hard drives and be completely impatient waiting for large files to bounce over USB 2.0 lines.
Still working on the RPG. Mr Fikree has managed to create some wonderful tracks. He created the tracks for TBA++ and I look forward to listening to all the music for the game. so far there are 10+ tracks and each is themed to the various areas of the game.
This weekend… yes more wedding prep and possibly that computer purchase. Carlie and I need to talk about it more before buying a new one. On Sunday I’m doing my last long run before the big run!
Oh and speaking of which, you might have noticed on the left side of the page a donation box. This is for a 100 mile bike ride I am doing in October after wedding. I’m riding from Irvine to San Diego down the California coast in two days to support MS research. Its for a good cause and is tax deductible. Feel free to donate or just feel free to cheer me on, or feel free to stick a pipe in my spokes and let me fly over the handle bars. Either way I appreciate the sentiment/maltreatment.
This post was written by John on Friday, August 28th, 2009. He has 488 posts on this blog.
Tags: ms ride, Photography, this is the only level