How does this game reflect you as a game designer?

The Dreaming reflects my passion for creating immersive and intuitive experiences through level design and cinematics. Starting off with the game levels, they are designed to be both easy and challenging enough for all players to push themselves in skill while simultaneously having fun. In addition, they are aesthetically created and sequenced to fit the game’s narrative of being stuck in a dream. Having mechanics is one core aspect of the game, but having an objective is what drives the player to use those mechanics. With jumping being one of the core mechanics, the game’s level design becomes drastically important to encourage the player to complete the game. Therefore, the logical and illogical aesthetic elements of the game not only played into the narrative aspect but also to the objective of the game.

Furthermore, the cinematics follow the same idea with some focusing on objective while others are for the pure narrative of the game. Cinematics either show what the player must do, where they must go, or tell the story through visuals. In short, cinematics elevates the immersion of the levels the players go through. This harmonization between aesthetics and mechanics is what I focus on as a level designer as it shapes the visuals of the levels and how the players play through these levels.

During the game's development process, what did you learn about your design practice?

Through the game’s development, I learned how iteration and feedback from other players impact my design practice. Iterating the levels myself is helpful at first to figure out if the level is passable at first. It also allows me to take in the perspective of what the player will see when going through the game; however, feedback from other players allowed me to iterate more effectively. When watching other players play through my game, I was able to take notes of where players constantly fail due to difficulty or where players get confused on where to go next. From the feedback I received during playtesting, I adjusted or reworked areas that diminished the experience of the game during my next iteration.

What is your design process, including what you did and why you made those design decisions

As for my design process, I created a custom process for level design and categorized my cinematics into three different categories. The custom process for level design follows three steps of: Pathway, Environment, and Obstacles (P.E.O). As for the process itself, the pathway includes a starting and endpoint, the environment consists of the overall play area, and the obstacles vary from gaps between platforms, or specialized platforms. The main reason for this custom process is that it allows me to create intuitive platform levels effectively and efficiently within the 10-week time constraint placed upon this project. Having intuitive levels allows the player to grasp the objective easily as they focus on completing the actual levels. I want players to know what they are doing with their skill level being the main obstacle. 

The categories for cinematics include guidance, objective, and pure narrative. Similar to the idea behind the custom process for level designs, these cinematics are catered to point the player in the right direction when playing through the game. A guiding cinematic show where the player must go. An objective cinematic shows visual progression to highlight what the player must do. Last comes a pure narrative cinematic to highlight why the player is where they are in the game. All these cinematics contribute to the intuitive experience of the game where the main obstacle is the skill of the player.

Anything you are particularly proud of in your game?

I am proud of the sound design of the game. From UI sounds to playing sounds, I sampled multiple free sounds and edited through other software such as FL Studio. With these sounds, I was able to create dynamic footsteps where the footstep sound changes depending on the surface the player is standing on. For example, metal sound will play when the player is walking on top of the cages differently from the wood sound when the player is walking on top of boxes.

What did not turn out as expected? What would you  do differently next time?

One of the things that did not turn out as expected was the total areas of the game. I had other areas in mind that could not be implemented due to time constraint and general bugs when iterating the game within different builds. Next time, I would compress some of the levels to be shorter in size as the first level is very short but took most of the time due to its environment. Environments would be simplified as the platforms are the main aspects for the players to go through when reaching for the objective.