Senior project, post 08: Level design

Now that I've got the main gameplay elements in, it's time to start doing some basic design work. Since I'm going for a sci-fi aesthetic, I figured that I should look at tech-related items as inspiration for my arena layout. For now, I'll keep it to a simple whitebox with static geometry. In the future, I may consider having elements of the arena that move around and have some verticality to them, but since this is the pre-alpha I want something that I can test quickly.

My main inspiration for the actual layout comes from the inside of computers. Circuit boards, motherboards - the component to which everything else is attached. Since I'm theming the game around hacking, I figure it's only appropriate to pay homage to the fiction of "hacking into the motherboard" (whatever that means).

Boiled down to the most basic shapes, you could say that a motherboard is basically a flat plane with some cuboids and cylinders sticking out of it - these are the RAM/capacitors and miscellaneous ports and I/O.

Level design resembles a PC motherboard. The player (in green) for scale. The black box is based on a CPU cooler, and is raised above the level on four columns.

My original version was about 3x smaller - I was surprised by just how big a level needed to be to give players enough space to drive around! I also had to adjust the positions of some of the standalone cylinders to give enough space for the player to pass between/behind.

At present, the players aren't affected by gravity, so if they were to drive off the board they would continue indefinitely. To prevent this I also added a wall around the entire stage. Then it was a simple matter of adding collision boxes to everything and then tagging them so that they destroy the player object.