Level Design

For the first level, it was very much my goal to use it as a way to ease players into the mechanics of the game, as they are relatively complex. For this reason, the first pass of level 1 was kept to just one fragment (blue circle), which made the level very straightforward. My second goal was also to make the house as reminiscent as possible of an actual house, to allow for more intuitive navigation, which is responsible for most of why it's laid out like this.

The main issue with this layout was that the escape route was so short it was basically instant, which made it so that traps would be entirely useless, and this level would fail as a tutorial.

As I started my second pass on this level, we made the decision to increase the fragment count from one to two, since we wanted players to understand right away that multiple fragments needed to be destroyed to capture the shade, and having only one fragment led to friction heading into level 2.

With this new version of the layout, I really wanted to make the pathing for the escape route more interesting. I still wanted to keep it to basically one option for completing the level, to reduce the mental load of solving it, but escaping needed a couple twists and turns, which led us to this layout.

With the way the level is laid out, it becomes necessary to collect the fragment in the backyard first, then the one in the hallway. After both are destroyed, the player then gets a small choice of whether to go through the kitchen or living room to escape.

When furnishing this level, I decided to start the player with no traps and make them pick up all the ones they would be using. My playtesters were frequently having issues where they didn't realize they had traps and also wouldn't know to look for more in the environment, so this helped resolve both of those issues.

At this point, the layout didn't change anymore, as I was pretty happy with how the level felt to navigate. There were still some friction points, like the front and back doors not being openable causing some confusion, but the level was small enough that it wasn't often an issue.

You can see all the way at the right side of the house there is a bear trap down a really long dead end. This isn't someplace I really want the players to go, but every single playtester I had went down the side yard so I figured I would rather reward them then try to fence off this area.