Level Designing is kinda cool, actually.

My first time ever designing a level map for a game is when I entered my first game jam on January 12th 2024. This was for the Pirate software game jam #14 and it was my first time working with a team. I was really nervous and didn't have any confidence in what I was able to do to influence the development process of the game. At first I didn't feel creative enough or even technical enough to contribute to the team.Despite my insecurities I push through with dipping my feet into the water and. The game idea was mine based of the game jam theme "It spreads.". The idea of the game was that you play as a little astronaut in a space station full of rogue robots. The player has two weapons that don't shoot bullets but instead shoot particle waves, almost like a ray gun.

Since my idea was agreed on to go first I was put into the lead game design role, managing the project pacing, coming up with game mechanics for the programmer and characters for the artist. I wasn't the only person that was new to making a game either, my teammates were also learning alongside me. That's when I got more comfortable to be able to enjoy and learn how to make a game. All of us were learning from each other and the experience with the very little time frame we had.The artist suggested that I should design the level since it could be a useful and fun skill to learn. So, I locked in and google and youtube searched how to level design. And boom I picked up my little tablet and got to drawing up three very basic maps for the levels. And let me tell you they were the best that I did at the time, however terrible looking they look, the key was to make it make sense. And it did

It was kinda stressful, I won't lie, I was concerned that they weren't good enough or that it wouldn't make sense. However, the artist was able to pull it off and it looked amazing (In my own opinion). They were able to execute all the levels perfectly as I drew them out, with the boss level being my favorite. Now, of course, they were by no means perfect in any way. In fact, the map was pretty but it wasn't functional.That's where I had to learn what level design truly is. Before I did a quick search and scribbled scrabble. Not only was the map not easy to navigate but the entire game wasn't playable so it got disqualified from the game jam. The team wasn't so beat up about it because we all were there to learn something for ourselves and we did. I learned how to get better at level design and level art. I not only learned how to make the level but also tested out the functionality of the level so that the player is able to traverse thought the map with no issues.

I was able to make more 2D level designing which got easy but also a bit boring, so I switched to 3D to further challenge things. My very first 3D level ever was learning how to use the 3D side of the engine of Godot 4. It wasn't anything special, just placing down mesh blocks, adding textures, adding models, and sprites. I called it "loveyourbrain", it was a joke an old friend would tell me whenever we had deep and philosophical discussions about life. So I just nicknamed the file just to keep the imposter syndrome and fear of messing up away.The experiment was messy and all over the place, I needed to learn how to place models into a scene, lighting, and more technical stuff. It was fun to play around freely without judging myself, I was able to learn just a little bit more.

When I had enough experimenting, I decided to give myself a challenge: Build a small town. I gave myself some small goals to achieve this small town: Make it the appropriate size, Make it fun to roam around, and Make it look pretty.It was a very very basic map. I just wanted to further develop my skill. The thing is, I did all of this manual within the Godot engine with no plugin and that was a pain to deal with. But don't worry I did use plugins later on. Making this small map was still fun to make. I learned how to add lights to some of the houses. Each house has their own colors and integrating textures onto the models. This has giving me the confidence to do more level designing and even consider 3D modeling.Above all, I have came a long way and still going, this is something I enjoy and I love learning new and interesting ways to level deisgn. One thing about being a solo developer is that you are doing everything at first. Then after a while, you start to see where your strongest skill shines more than the other. While I love to do everything, it does get stressful for me to do multiple things at one. However, i find that I am completely okay with doing level designing and still have my other soft skills on deck. So yea, level designing is kinda cool.

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