Lift Off
Lift off is a community workshop level for the game Marble It Up! which is released on Steam and Nintendo Switch. When creating Lift Off I gave myself a deadline of 5 days to complete the level and have it published on the Steam workshop. During this time I had to conceptualize the level, organize my thoughts, build, test, and iterate on the level.
Conceptualization
When building Lift Off my first plan of attack was to quickly organize my thoughts on a level design document before starting the block out of the level. Truth be told, Lift Off wasn't my original idea and I had to change my idea a couple of times before truly deciding on what would later be Lift Off. At first Lift Off was known as Biospheres, a level of biospheres each with their own unique challenge utilizing one of Marble It Up!'s special power-ups, orbiting around a large planet in the middle where the player would return to once each challenge was completed. The more I sat on it though, the more I felt like my original idea was too big and didn't fit with the design philosophy of Marble It Up! so instead I opted to cut the level down and limit what was my 3 challenges down to one instead.
Of the 3 challenges I had planned I chose to create a mountain with an ice texture and bumpers that push the player. The goal of the level would be to reach the top of the mountain and then ride the ice down to the bottom as a satisfying conclusion to the climb. When the player is on the ice it becomes much harder to move around as you slip and slide everywhere based on your velocity. The slope of the mountain would be steep enough that the player would be unable to scale it under any normal means. Instead of using the marble they control to climb the mountain, they would use bumpers placed along the mountain to scale it as they push the player around. After testing this idea out in a metrics scene I came to the realization that it just wasn't fun and decided to scrap that idea and move on to the next.
After two defeats I went back to the drawing board and re-evaluated what I found most fun about Marble It Up! and decided that I wanted to do a level that had twists and turns and the player going at a high speed. From there I decided how I wanted the level to end because each level in Marble It Up! has a satisfying ending and I wanted to leave the player satisfied. Since this was going to be a high speed level I decided to have the player shoot off a ramp into the sky with the feather fall power-up which makes the player extremely floaty, that way they could go extremely high into the air and end the level landing on a planet high in the sky. From there I just had to fill in the gaps to give the level a smooth progression and rising difficulty.
Block Out
Once I felt that my documentation was solid enough I started the block out of the level. However, before I could really do that I needed to familiarize myself the modding tools for Marble It Up! and learn how everything was working between the editor and game so there would be no issues before publishing the level to Steam. Luckily the modding tools were extremely straight forward so I didn't have to spend much time learning much of anything before I could get to my favorite part of the level building process.
Since I was making a level based on moving at a high speed I knew that it would be hard for players to be precise when moving super fast so I had to make the level much larger than it normally would have been and less curvy than normal too. I made sure to add quarter pipes to turns that I felt would be too sharp for the player to make that way the level would be forgiving but not so forgiving if a player was putting no thought into their actions. I divided the level up into five small parts each with ramping difficulty.
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The starting area was comprised of two parts. The first part would introduce the concept of high speed curves with the quarter pipe covering the entirety of the curve. The second part after the jump would have various long holes for the player to either dodge or jump over. If the player chooses to make the risky jumps they would get rewarded with a power-up that would slow down the timer, something helpful for those who are trying to get the world record for the stage or just complete it as fast as possible.
After that would come the transition to the next area. I wanted to have the level wrap around in some sort of way rather than just just curve so I found a clever way to utilize the feather fall and introduce to the player that it would be used later in the level. At the end of the first area I set it up so that the player would have to use the feather fall to hit a slanted platform that would then shift their momentum to the right and direct them towards the next area where they would land and continue on.
The second area would be an expansion of the curves from the first area. Rather than just curving one way, I would introduce multiple different curves along with the curve actually curving down. I reduced the size of the quarter pipes on each curve to add more difficulty to the area and force the player to play it a little more safe. If they go too fast the curves won't save them here so they would have to shift their momentum or slightly slow down to account for the curves here. The end of this area would be the same as the last to further compound the feather fall in the player's head.
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The final area would be the most difficult non-curving section of the level. Here it would require the player to use precise left and right movement as there would be substantially less ground for the player to be on. This section would start off a little easy and introduce to the player that there would be a lot less ground. After that it would go full force and the player would have to use the best of their skills to either navigate the sparse floor or use their massive speed to jump between the floor and make it to the ramp at the end. Once finished with this area the player is greeted with a large rainbow ramp, lots of super speed power-ups, and a feather fall power-up. In order to reach the conclusion of the level they must quickly use each power up to speed along the floor and fly off the ramp. The player soars through the sky for a few second and makes it into the goal as they land on the planet they just shot up too, hence the name "Lift Off."
Playtesting & Iteration
A large amount of my time was spent tabbing between Unity and the Marble It Up! level tester. Overall I would say about 25% of my time was spent just testing the level in the tester and logging what went wrong and right with each test and then figuring out how I would iterate on it to make the product better. My process for testing would be to create a setup in the editor, export the level, test the set up, iterate the setup, test and repeat until I felt that it felt good, and then move on to the next setup. Rinse and repeat for each set up. Once each setup was finished I would start the next setup and make sure the previous would connect to it and then proceed on to test and iterate. Testing was extremely important for this project especially because of the nature of the level I was creating. Flow needs to be a priority for speed based levels because that's what makes them feel so good. In order to get a good flow going you have to test quite a bit.
Below are some images from inside of Marble It Up! showcasing the level Lift Off.