Beat chart is the gamer's best friend.

Hello!

I am a game designer and at the moment, together with a small team, I am developing a two-dimensional adventure game on Unity3D. The purpose of this publication is to tell about the design process of locations for our game and the techniques that I use.
Well, in parallel to show you all the stages of development locations - from the scheme to the final version.


Running a little ahead - this is how a piece of the finished location in action looks.

Let's start with the title beat-chart. What is it, what it is eaten with, and why it is a very convenient thing.
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A bit chart is a one-page document describing the structure of the entire game (all content, mechanics, narrative, etc.)

With its help, it is damn convenient to monitor the progress of the gameplay, ensuring that at each location / level the player does not get bored and receives new portions of the game experience, but at the same time is not overloaded with information. I use a bit-chart in the form of a table, since this is the most convenient form for perceiving such a volume and nature of information.

To create a bit-chart for your game, you must:

1. Describe all the parameters required for each location;
2. Make a list of game mechanics and content that you plan to use;
3. Carefully distribute content and game mechanics to locations, avoiding excessive saturation and explicit gaps, as well as the boring repetition of combinations of game elements.

For clarity, let's go over my bit-chart.
In my case, each location has:

1. Name or code name;
2. A brief description of the location (time of year and day, color scheme);
3. Additional location mechanics (we have some new global mechanics in almost every location);
4. Brief description of all events occurring at the location;
5. Player progress (on what aspects of the gameplay is focused, what does the player learn, what does he learn about the game);
6. Approximate time of the location;
7. Enumeration of content at locations (characters, objects, objects, threats, even specific game mechanics);
8. Enumeration of audio content (sounds and music).

Usually, the bit-chart also contains brief information about the game economy (how much resources a player can earn on a location and what they can spend on, for example).

Having all this scoop of information before your eyes, it is very convenient to customize the gameplay so that the player does not get bored.

The basic recommendations for the distribution of content are simple: do not dump too much at once on a player and avoid repeating combinations of game elements.

OK, we have sketched the structure of the game, it's time to move on to the design of individual locations.

I create a label for one location, partially repeating information from the bit-chart, but more detailed. Each location is divided into “screens” for convenience. On each screen are objects / objects / characters / other content.



This is a very old version of the plate of one of our locations, at the very bottom there is also an approximate arrangement of the screens ...



... which I then transfer to Illustrator. Now we have an empty "map" of the location and a list of all-all-all pieces that should be located on it. It's time to put everything in its place!

Very often, the initial configuration of the location changes. Elements and their connections disappear, are added, change their location. This is a normal process exactly until the rest of the team has begun to implement the level in the game. The later changes are made to the original plan, the more they cost, so it is important to try to take into account the maximum details in advance.


This is how the level map looks after I have depicted all the objects and the landscape on it.

Even if the artist of you is as deplorable as me, information is always easier to perceive in a visual form. This is an important point that should not be neglected. From hand I usually draw only a landscape, characters and objects are often depicted as colored markers or some placeholders. IMHO, it is also very important to supply any of your game design thoughts with the most detailed visual references (examples). This way you greatly simplify understanding with your artists. Refs to backgrounds are located directly on the location map.

During the whole process, we gather the whole team once or twice so that I can listen to phrases in the style of “We don’t code in life” or “And here, instead of a colony of cave poisonous unicorns, we will live berserks jerboa”. According to the results of these mitaps, I humbly make changes to the location configuration.

Well, as soon as everything is ready, discussed and approved - I send the location map to the artists. And then the magic is going on!


From schematic to sketch

I hope the post was useful to you, or at least curious.

If the topic is interesting to the community, then I have more to share.

Stay tuned.