I've been pretty active lately at ReachingPerfection.com

There, I've started posting a few short offerings of my understanding of level design. Since that sight is full of people who create maps using Halo Reach's Forge, I have many references to Halo maps. Just keep that in mind when reading them. In the spirit of keeping all my things together, I'll be bringing those over here as well. Starting now...

Landmarks

Landmarks are unique objects that make a location memorable. These are used for orientation and communication. Examples of Landmarks are: a giant statue, satellite dish, huge cliff face, a building, a raging inferno, etc. Just make sure that it’s a unique object, and there aren’t a thousand of them on your map, as this will lead to disorientation. You want each of your landmarks to be one of a kind. One way to test if you have unique landmarks on your map is to listen to what people say when they are calling out location during a game. Examples of callouts when you have good Landmarks are: the fan, waterfall, ribs, dish, cliff top, the base. Example of when you do not have strong, unique Landmarks are: grey hall, long grey hall, grey ramp, grey room, second grey room, pillar beside you, pillar beside me, ummmm.

Landmarks, being big, cool things, draw people in. Because of this, it’s important to use them to draw people to the best places. If you have a specific area you want people to go to fight, put your coolest Landmark there. All your less cool Landmarks should be in slightly less important places on your map. Do not let your Landmarks direct players in a way that will make them miss something. If you want players to pick up your rocket launcher, put it between where they spawn and a Landmark. They will not check behind them.

Don’t put too many Landmarks too close together either. If I spawn and see two Landmarks, then I may not end up going to the satellite dish like you wanted me to, because I decided to run toward the hanging chandelier. Each Place (next lesson) needs no more than one significant Landmark.

Nothing is worse in the world than an infrequently updated blog. Lately I've been working on several different projects to keep my skills fresh and to have fun while doing it. The project that is coming along nicely is the Flash game. Let me tell you how this came to be.

A while ago I started playing around in Flash to see what I could learn about it. I don't really do much art, but I was learning how ActionScript 3 works and was playing around with several ideas for games. The first several ideas I tried either ended up not being fun, or were way too large for me to do alone. Eventually I stumbled across something that was small enough in scope that I could do all the scripting by myself, yet was still fun to play for a while. It was a turret defense type game.

With all the practice I'd been getting from the previous prototypes, I was able to set up a solid structural foundation to ActionScript for the game so that I could easily expand it whenever I decided to. Once the basics were down (aiming the turret base, shooting bullets, detecting collision with things), I was able to start all the experimenting with different weapon types. I must have tried 15 or so different weapon ideas, but I wanted to keep things manageable for the players, so I took the 10 coolest weapons and went from there. The coolest weapon that got left out was a gun that shoots bullets that bounce off of enemies and increase in damage with each bounce. The only problem with that is that I could only get realistic bounces from circular shaped enemies, and I didn't want to make a game with nothing but a lot of different colored floating balls.

Anyway, some people looked at the game and said things like, "Hey, that's an alright piece of work, but get someone who is good at drawing (not you) to do the visuals." I talked to a former classmate of mine, Max, who is good at drawing things. He's helping me now. I'll post some before and after pics once we get stuff in there.