Sprint 1 Blog

    During the first sprint of production for our game Night Watch our team put a heavy emphasis on setting up a paper playtest alongside our Game Design Document and backlog of work we will need to do to create Night Watch.

    As a level designer I took priority on crafting the paper prototype itself for us to do testing on our game's core concept This included creating concepts for the levels, creating the tokens, and doing initial playtests so that edits could be made to create an optimal player experience. 

Due to its unique nature as an anti-stealth game there needs to be a good mixture of looking for thieves, finding the thieves, and then hunting the thieves. The lack of recognizable reference for an anti-stealth genre has made designing levels for it an interesting task. This first version of the paper prototype level was meant to create a feeling of scale for what we would need from our levels. Due to its unique nature as an anti-stealth game there needs to be a good mixture of looking for thieves, finding the thieves, and then hunting the thieves. This first iteration made it easy to hunt the thieves after they were found, but its small hallways, excessive corridors, and large number of entrance routes made it difficult for players to properly scan the area for thieves.

This second version of the paper prototype level was meant to create a feeling of scale for what we would need from our levels. This second iteration made looking for and finding thieves an easy task due to how much wider the open areas are but the large scale of the map caused hunting down thieves to be extremely frustrating as an experience.

This third version built on the scale of the first level and the wider spaces of the second. This iteration provided a much more well round experience. Thieves were given plenty of spaces to creep around corners and find sneaky routes while the player was not frustrated from chasing thieves through a large map.

Due to the multiple level concepts I was able to come up with a much better idea of how certain aspects of levels should look. Large openings are important for player sightlines to give players a better sense of what they can see with their security measures, but multiple corridors and pathways are critical for the A.I. controlled thieves to be able to succeed and provide a challenge to the player.

The next issue we had was that the players needed tokens to use. In order to allow our 3D artist extra time to design models for use in our electronic prototype in a few weeks I took up crafting the tokens as well.

Finally as the producer for the team I additionally had to ensure that our Trello board was prepared for our AGILE process for the entire project. Thanks to the hard work done by our lead designer on gathering a list of assets we would need for the game, I was able to create a full 14 week board to ensure that there is a steady flow of work across the semester