I’m currently working on a new hub level, and I’d like to take a moment to talk about my approach to its design.
This level is intended to be a very central location in the game, an area that players would return to often as a way to transition between different areas. As such, I needed it to be very visually distinct, so that every time players return to this area, they know exactly where they are, and can feel grounded.
My initial idea was that it would look like the interior of a box. This way, it would be very easy for the player to see where all the different parts of the his level is, and because it would be so sparse compared to the other levels, it would be immediately recognizable.
Just a plain old box would have been too boring, so I decided to spice things up by removing different surfaces of the box to create these winding pathways:
Here are a few shots from the player’s point of view:
The problem is that it looks quite convoluted, and actually not as easily recognizable as I would have liked. In fact, it looked a lot like areas from other hub levels.
I spent about 4 hours building this level, and after getting nowhere with it, I decided to go to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I remember this level I made back in July 2013:
It was one of these levels I drew up thinking it looked really cool, but turned out to not work very well at all. I had it set up where there was an entrance and an exit in this level. I hadn’t implemented world wrapping at the time, so none of the geometry you see here are repetitions of the same stuff, it’s all different.
This meant that if the player wandered away from where I had intended for them to go, they would get lost very easily. And by having the geometry repeat itself in all directions, there was no way for players to orient themselves, and get a sense of where they were in relation to where they were supposed to be. It was a disaster, so I ended up removing this level.
However, last night, I realized that now with world wrapping, I can actually bring this level back, and it would work really well. In fact, it solves the problem of the level looking too much like others.
In all the other hubs, the world wrapping means that the repetitions of the world appear as floating platforms in the distance. In none of them do the repeated worlds connect. This means that here, when they do connect, it is visually very striking. It also means that I can have the appearance of an endlessly repeating infinite space, but when players wander off, they will always return to the heart of the level, so they can’t actually get lost.
Here’s a shot of what the hub looks like in the editor:
Here’s what it looks like from the player’s perspective:
And some gifs to show what it’s like to move through this space:
