Stress Management - Level Design

   Hooray for Power Game Factory(may it die in a fire) being a miserable pile. The initial plan was for me to make a series of placeholders for parts of the environment we would import into the game as scenery. We would then arrange them as needed and mask out the level from their positions. Thing is, when you go to edit the level mask in PGF(midiaf) none of the scenery is displayed. So we had to scrap all of the placeholders and I had to build the entire level as a single image.

   I kept to the same philosophy behind the initial placeholders where I wanted simple shapes that could be copied and pasted repeatedly to build the level. The result was an ugly but highly modular approach which allows me to build levels at a very quick pace relative to drawing everything out as a raster image, as well as allowing for quick edits as issues with the mask are discovered. Once any and all problems with the layout are discovered, it should be relatively easy for me to go back into Inkscape and actually make things pretty.  In order to make masking the level out easier I built everything on a grid with divisions every 4 pixels, as that is smallest unit that a mask in PGF(midiaf) can be drawn at.

   There are two small 'tutorial' segments built into the level.

   In the first segment the player is presented with a vertical wall preventing progress. While it is likely that the player will have discovered that their character can jump before this point, it is possible that they will not have discovered that they can land/walk on the cubicle walls. In order to demonstrate this to the player I have placed walkable walls immediately before and after the wall preventing progress. If the player fails to clear the obstacle, their character will be forced to land on the half-sized wall before it, both demonstrating the ability to walk on walls and giving him a platform to make the jump easier. If the player clears the wall, they will still end up landing on a wall.

   The second 'tutorial' is less important but more rewarding. The point here is to demonstrate to the player that they can also move behind objects in the foreground. The intention is place some sort of reward (be it powerup, ammuntion, weapon, etc.) in the cubbyhole in the bottom right of the image. This should invite exploration in moving behind objects.