Level Design
I showed off a partially finished cave level before called the Abandoned Archives and now I have been trying to complete it.
The point of this cave is to explore and to find and capture different monsters, so I don’t want to make it a single path towards the end. I added multiple branching paths that all eventually lead to the end of the level at the bottom left and you can use any of these or even all of them, depending on how you want to play. The white lines mark all the possible passages and everything bellow the dotted yellow line are the new parts I recently planned out. I will also need to place something at the end of the level to mark the spot where you can finish the level or continue exploring. I want to make a simple crafting system where you can upgrade or exchange the monsters you captured, so most likely a device for that will go there.
I have been painting the final version of this cave for a good bit already actually( I kept forgetting to upload this sketch) and I already spent probably around 80 hours on that. A yellow rectangle marks how much of the cave you can see in a single screen, so I think it’s gotten quite large. It’s a lot of work, but I’m quite close to completing it so it’s somewhat manageable. If I painted every little bit completely from nothing than it would likely be way too much work to complete anything in a reasonable amount of time( by reasonable I mean before I get bored or burned out), but I am reusing smaller parts of the environment quite a bit. I copy and modify parts to make it not obvious and paint from scratch where that’s unaplicable. I think this approach works quite well, I can put a lot of variety in these levels and not be limited with a strict grid like I would be if I used a tileset.
The next thing to do will be to add randomized extra rooms to really expand on the variety, I want to level to be replayable after all. I left some spaces in the level where those can fit and also quite a few of those will go around the sides. Note sure how many of those I will be including yet, but I definitely know I want to have that mechanic.
On the right middle I have an arrow marking passage to another cave. That cave is still in the concept stage, but overall I think it would be cool to have all the levels I add in the future to connect to this one, so you have larger and larger single area to explore, as opposed to several separate levels. At the beginning only the Abandoned Archives will be unlocked, but you will be able to permanently unlock the connection between caves if you enter that passage from the other cave, once that’s available.