Building a Better Room
If the player needs to be stuck in a room, give them a reason for being there. And do something cool while they’re at it!
Solar Purge is a game that straddles decades of game design. Some of its biggest inspirations such as Smash TV (Midway Games, 1990) and Gauntlet Legends (Atari/Midway, 1998) had already sailed into the lands of the Utter West, and while players were familiar with a looter-shooter concept thanks to the success of Borderlands (Gearbox, 2009) and the perennial Diablo 2 (Blizzard, 2000) many younger gamers have little to no experience with a twin stick shooter control scheme.
Enter the tutorial level, Lockjaw Prison. This level introduces (or re-introduces) players young and old to the concept of moving and aiming independently using both controller sticks, as well as how leveling, special skill usage, and weapons work in-game.
Lockjaw Prison is located in an asteroid belt surrounding a radiation-heavy blue star at the edge of human space, now under the jurisdiction of the alien Aesrenan Empire. As one asteroid is tunneled out and strip-mined, the modular complex can be quickly and cheaply rebuilt on the next one.
Almost immediately upon arrival, the prison comes under attack by another species of alien pirates and the players must find a way to escape as the entire facility begins to experience decompression. This isn’t only to add a sense of urgency to the mission; it allows us to unload entire swathes of art assets to improve performance, while clearly communicating to players that they cannot backtrack, since every door that locks behind them will soon be part of the vacuum of space.
The initial mining area introduces players to basic play control, skill equipping, and combat. After defeating a miniboss, the players arrive in the cell blocks, where they must ultimately make their way to the hangar bay at the end of the level and escape. This second half of the level allows us to ratchet up combat difficulty and give the players an opportunity to experiment with weapons and skills to discover a playstyle that works for them.
You can see below how even at the earliest top-down stage there was some confusion on the part of the level designer and project lead as to what exactly would happen at the halfway point of the cell blocks leading into the final quarter of the level as a whole:
These dreaded question mark zones are my specialty!
After meeting with the level designer and project lead, we came to the consensus that we should streamline this central region into a single room, since a room with two large obstacles could still be confusing for players only just getting used to the control scheme and combat mechanics. We could then place a medium to large-scale combat encounter, the first time players would truly be in danger of being overwhelmed by regular enemies, and use the room as a change of pace from the tight corridors placed before and after.
However, things didn’t go exactly according to plan. Play testers simply moved into and out of the room, with no compelling reason to make use of the unique level geometry. Enemy spawners in Solar Purge work best when producing opponents on the other side of the screen, and other than kiting a group around corners while reloading or waiting those final seconds for a skill to recharge, there was very little reason to stay here. By this time, however blockout work had already continued and we were stuck with frankly, a pretty boring room in what was supposed to be a thrilling escape.
I wasn’t out of ideas yet, though!
While working on a narrative pass on a new level, be it to name sectors for display on the mini-map or helping to plan combat encounters, I like to ask a few questions:
What is the purpose of this in the larger narrative context of the level?
How is it related to the room that came before, and the room that comes after?
In the context of gameplay, what can happen that makes the experience here unique compared to the adjoining rooms?
The player’s presence is unusual, so what would happen in this room on a regular business-as-usual kind of day?
Thinking about these points, I remembered a lighting object we had created recently for use throughout the prison - a spinning fan silhouette backlit by a powerful spotlight in order to give the suggestion of an air duct system. I was staring at the atmospheric control room! In line with discussions at my very first team meeting, when the tone of the game was described to me as “The Expanse meets Guardians of the Galaxy,” I had recently created an NPC to guide players through their experience in the prison, a disembodied voice (and occasional holographic projection) who refers to prisoners as “guests” and acts like a cross between a prison guard and a hotel concierge. The answers to my questions were therefore:
This is the control room for all air flow in (at least this part of) the prison.
Players enter through the maintenance area behind one group of cell blocks, and can exit through other maintenance areas into another group of cell blocks.
Marking the transition to the final quarter of the tutorial, this would be an ideal opportunity to introduce new enemy types in a closed arena setting.
Usually this entire area would be strictly off-limits to “guests,” so advanced security measures are justified in the context of the player’s presence here.
Using a few existing corner wall pieces, I raised the middle of the floor, added a control panel to the existing raised section, and another control panel on the north wall to open the exit door and continue into the final quarter of the level, where we had already determined that players would finally be able to engage with the Scorlak pirates (having previously only seen corpses near the miniboss at the end of the mining zone and level halfway point). A three-stage encounter was rapidly taking shape:
Enter the room, get locked in, and face a large number of standard enemies
Deactivate the fans to match pressure between this room and the next, and face an elite enemy encounter
Unlock the pressure door leading into the next area and face a new enemy type, the Skorlac Pirate
The first stage involves a by this point standard appearance of the condescending Prison Attendant, drolly explaining the player’s trespassing violation in the middle of the entire facility breaking up into space debris:
The second stage introduces elite enemies. Enemies in Solar Purge have the chance to spawn as “elites;” these versions have a gold highlight, are marked with a skull icon, and have significantly more health and damage output, as well as a unique attack not available to their standard counterparts. I chose the security drones for use in the second stage for two reasons:
their capsule is no different from any other enemy, but they appear to be flying and could descend from the ceiling (especially now that the large central fan is no longer animated after activating the control panel)
their upgraded attack skill is firing grenades, which create spectacular explosions and add an element of chaos to the encounter
The third and final stage introduces the Skorlac Warrior, a mid-range skirmisher with heavy firepower and grenades, creating a natural escalation from the elite drones’ grenades and establishing that even in standard variety, this is the toughest enemy type the player has faced so far:
The final quarter of the prison level briefly returns to the cell blocks, now quite literally falling apart as players are sandwiched between tough enemies and falling debris, moving past wrecked Skorlac fighter ships that have bored into the prison hull.
Here they move from set-piece to set-piece, including another arena battle in the oxygen generation room, another encounter set over a deep chasm to showcase the drones’ (illusory) flying ability, a military warehouse infested with living bioweapons run amok, and an elevator ride to the asteroid’s surface where they engage with the final boss before escaping to the game’s hub level and the rest of the adventures of Solar Purge!
Turning level design “crises” into opportunities is one of my favorite aspects of game design!