The Tiered Map...A Beginning

For this project, we were given something a little different. We still were given the same theme of "post-apocalyptic alien invasion" and we had to do the same concept art and such, but what we weren't expecting was the formation of groups. For this map, or should I say maps, we were told to gather into groups of three to make three maps, one beginner, one intermediate, and one advanced, all connected together using the same story, items, and characters. I chose to do the beginner map since I felt like I could use my experiences from my last maps and incorporate them well to help the players understand what to do and how to do it very easily.

My map was an abandoned city that was desecrated by an alien attack, leaving behind mutants, ghouls, and raiders alike. When I first gave the players a very short backstory to the map, they were more intrigued and ready to get started on the map, which they came to enjoy. When I let them start, however, they felt that it was good, but it also needed some work. Since I'm not super informed when it comes to printing certain things, I was forced to try to fit this map onto a single piece of paper, which made gameplay very slow and hard as it was hard to see the tiles and items that could be collected. Also, I eventually had to inform them that the "cars" within the level were all able to be looted to find possible items, leading to them doing some backtracking and getting frustrated when they found out that some of their backtracking was for nothing. However, when given a pair of jumper cables that had no significance to gameplay, the playtesters actually used this in quite a creative way in battles, resulting in some cool action sequences that added to their gameplay experience.

Before going to far into the map though, the playtesters first noticed an alley to the bottom left close to where they started, which led them to another small portion of map that I made to allow for some slight branching paths. There were a few enemies in here, specifically one mutant and one ghoul, and they all felt like they were well balanced overall, but they also felt that the ghoul was just plain annoying (it has very low attack and very low hp, but it's able to dodge almost all attacks with ease). However, they felt huge satisfaction after they finally defeated the ghoul with a headlock backslam. They also liked the weapon given to them for their efforts (an iconic .44 magnum). They felt the weapon was properly balanced for this level alone, but when moving onto the next two levels, they felt the weapon didn't do too much for their attacks. The items still helped, but not as much, which I felt was a fault of most of my items. However, they did like the ways of using the items, such as certain dice rolls giving you certain outcomes.

Next to the small trader building towards the end of the map, one building is actually enter-able from the outside, but they didn't pick that up until I showed them. Since I printed the map out so small, they weren't able to see the entrance or the contrast of the entrance at all, causing them to completely waltz over it. However, once they were told about the area, they enjoyed it a good amount. I added in a medium difficulty enemy to the building (a robot to be exact) which was guarding a box of grenades, which was a very good item that was better than most of my other items. They thought this enemy was well balanced as well, but they also thought he was a tad too challenging. However, they were happy with the item given.

Due to time restraints with each map, I wasn't able to go fully into how the trader system works in our tiered maps, forcing me to choose between two items that the playtesters could choose from to take for free (we originally had currency in mind for our maps, but decided to scrap it due to time restraint). Overall, they enjoyed my map, but they felt that with more tweaking, it could work a lot better.

It was a cool experience being able to work with a team of three as it allowed us to bounce ideas off of each other for what could be good and bad for each of our levels, and it allowed us to dive into an overarching story to tell over the course of the three maps, making in much more enjoyable for the playtesters. I also feel like it made us think about balancing and level design much more than previous maps as we had to make it balanced for each map iteration (and also because the enemies and the playtesters rank up each time a new level starts). My team was a great one and I feel we all worked together very well. My only complaint was the matter of figuring out time constraints, but that wasn't the team I was in or anything, but more about the instructions of the assignment. Overall, I'm looking forward to doing more group projects like this in the future and I hope to perfect this map in the near future.