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When I'm designing levels, my process starts with a document. The image to the right is to-scale, with each square being a unit of one Booklet, Booklet being the player character. The spaces are labeled so that every area has an identity, and every space serves a purpose.
The most important thing for the designing of Noir City was the size: it had to be small. If you've played the level, it may not seem like a cramped space, but the truth is by the standards of a platformer the streets are tiny, and the interiors of the buildings especially tiny.
How tiny?
Every street in the game you can get from one sidewalk to the other with less than the maximum extent of a regular jump, which for a platformer means they are arms' length. They interiors are only a bit wider and do not benefit from the length of the streets, even worse they are indoors and have ceilings!
Beyond being small in terms of the literal size, the whole level is essentially just two things: streets and interiors, and all the interiors are intentionally meant to be similar to one another. The speak easy and both hangouts are essentially the same space but with different contexts, otherwise, they require the same exact furnishing and props, so it's not 10 or so different spaces, it's more like 2 spaces each copy pasted, rearranged, and recontextualized multiple times.
Why so small?
Budget! Noir City was the last and riskiest level we decided to make, it almost didn't happen! The most important objective by far with the creation of the level was being able to afford it with our time-budget, and it had to be achievable with as little time spent by our artists as possible.
There were two ways two make the most of a level which is small, I did both.
First, reuse things as much as we can. I made 8 distinct gameplay 'sections' each with it's own player pathway which would have players moving through the level in a way they hadn't before and doing something they hadn't before. Just because the level itself isn't very large doesn't mean there can't be lots to do, and many different ways to navigate the same environment.
The second was to go up. Given the level's visual motifs of buildings with furnished interiors that share many elements & the profeciency of our team's lead artist, Caleb Sapnier, with modular kits: building up was just cheaper than building out. So I did the same thing the city planners who inspired the level did.
I rose to the sky.
Building up and not out and making use of verticality also meant unique level design challenges when it came to dominant strategies and pathways. Gravity is a constant, if you can get above something, you can drop to it, which means whatever pathway is highest is immediately able to access the other pathways unless some barriers are erected between it and the other paths, and those barriers themselves become level geometry. These design risks were tackled by the duo that solves most every design risk: documenting before building and testing immediately after building.
So, what's fun to do when you're in Noir City?
See a story. Our Narrative Designer & Writer Daniel had alerady figured out the themes of the level and how it fit into the overall plot, but left the details of the plot within the level open.
So, we co-created an outline out of story beats using the already created player pathways. These would become the events of the level and would eventually be the bones of the level's puzzle challenges, cutscenes, and the narrative experience of the level.
After Daniel turned our story beats into a full fledged script, we got the voicelines recorded using in-house VA (I play the character 'the Narrator'), implemented the voicelines into the game within a cutscene system, and arranged the relevant keys and doors (our level design keys and doors happen to be literal keys and doors) so that players would always experience the correct order of events and intended narrative experience.
It's a twine project solo-developed by me, with a great story and choices! These choices are numerous and nuanced, and they lead to different gameplay experiences, it's really cool I swear.
The whole thing. In specific, a lot of writing, and a decent amount of twine-coding, but mainly it was a lot of proof-reading/testing to make sure everything functioned properly and, most importantly, clarifying. What do I mean by clarifying? At the intersection of writing and design is expression, which is the very soul of art. That's a very sentimental way of saying that you can come up with a cool concept and idea and write it down but if you don't make it parsable by your audience you've not accomplished much. With that in mind, it really is a complicated story, and it was hard to express the crazy ideas held within through the ridiculous subject matter in a way most people would understand. Initially, I got a lot of feedback from testers that my first drafts did not do enough to let the audience in, that it was too hard to keep track of what was happening and what things meant.
So, I adjusted, I iterated, I reformatted. I changed wording, I changed placement, I changed the ways I informed the audience about who is talking and what's happening. I paid close attention to the feedback I got from my testers and did what I could to accomodate them in each new draft. And ultimately, it paid off, and the proof is in the kasha.
Because I can make short-narratives in other mediums also. If you can make it in twine you can make it anywhere. The core skills involved in making this aren't just applicable to telling stories about Communism and God, or telling stories via html files with hypertext, they are applicable wherever we tell stories with software. The medium could be a level, it could be a cutscene, it could be a trailer, it could be a website, it could be whatever, it's all about expressing ideas, and the same goes for those ideas, as well, it really can be anything.
Solo Developer, PC Game 2023
