I don’t have any pictures, but maybe I’ll get some later.
My concept for my latest LittleBigPlanet level was simple – a large mazework of iron girders, which you’d run through at high speed for awhile and then have to solve cute puzzles to proceed. The problem comes with the complexity meter.
This is a little red thermometer at the left of the screen that keeps track of the complexity of your level, similar to the one in SPORE. Once it fills, you’re done.
The same happens in miniature with the complexity of individual shapes. Every object you create from scratch starts out as various geometric primitives, which you then carve or combine with others to make objects – a process called Constructive Solid Geometry, or CSG. When dealing with something as massive as a maze, I’ve been bumping up against this time and again. I’ve dealt with it by carving the maze into large chunks, which let me get away with running secret tunnels through it.
Back to the complexity thermometer. I don’t know how the Media Molecule LBP levels get so incredibly complex. I started off with a puzzle where you use a rocket sled to push you through an area you can’t walk through. It’s a really complicated machine which rolls the sled back to its home after it crashes, so you can try again if you didn’t make it the first time. The barrier you are flung over is a complicated pile of machinery with a little spring-operated mechanism to keep it all from falling apart. Following that is another rocket sled to cross the bottom, which tosses you onto a piston-driven platform that flings you way up and deep into the maze.
This is the opening of the level, and once you know the course, you can get to this point in about fifteen seconds.
And that brought the complexity meter to about 20%. Adding the next puzzle – one where you have to jump on cushions being fired from a cannon to reach a high crawlway (and, if you keep going up, a secret passage) – and the beginnings of another – where you have to fling a balloon into an overhead opening in order to lower some stairs – brought me to 30%.
I’m really getting concerned that some of the set pieces I have yet to do – a cart race and my Dippy Bird area – will fill the meter. But what I’m doing just doesn’t seem as complicated as some of those MM levels. Plus, I still have to put the point bubbles, prize bubbles, NPCs who give puzzle hints, and the polish in. I left the entire back plane empty so I could fill it with stuff going on in the background, but my original designs of having giant pistons and gears going on in the back probably won’t happen.
My largest issue isn’t really an issue. But this is taking an incredibly long time. Doing level design with a PS3 controller and level after level of menus for everything is tedious to begin with. Having to deal with the physics engine for everything is also not as cool as it should be. I wanted to have flying fish swimming through one of the sections. Making flying fish was no problem, but putting the brains on them so they could be destroyed by the player weighed them down so much that they just ended up pinned to the ground and looking really pathetic.
I guess no design survives implementation.
I ran some more user-created levels to get inspiration. There’s a LOT of great designers out there.
I’ll be glad when I’m done this one. It’s been a real learning experience, but it does have some nice points. It’s big, so I can try different things, and it’s not based on anything, like an EQ dungeon, so it doesn’t have to make any sense. There’s no room for rocket sleds or pillow cannons in Befallen. But based on my experiences with the maze, Befallen will be a lot faster and more linear when I do get back to it. In retrospect, it was stupid to try and do Befallen as my first level. Especially since the dungeon itself has no specific goal. Dragons of Norrath missions would be way easier to rip off.