Game Design Path

You’ve come a long way - but there is far more to discover

Alright! You’ve made it this far and hopefully have a good sense for how the game world is structured and how you can change it yourself.

We looked at how to design levels, but designing them well takes knowledge and practice. Here is a decent article about level design on Gamasutra: Beginning Level Design

Game design also involves much more than just editing levels. It’s about developing the purpose of this game - the story, the mechanics, scenarios, ways to win and lose and so much more…

Some additional ideas that you might want to implement with your teammates in order of increasing difficulty could be:

• Make your own stats panel, add some new kinds of stats for the player
• Death screen (perhaps with option to play again), if the player dies, instead of just closing the game
• A game menu to appear when you start the game
• Tokens or coins to collect
• Saving functionality (you don’t want to lose your coins after all)
• Pause text or menu
• NPCs you can talk to, or signs you can read
• Power Ups!
• Multiplayer (with 2 people on the same keyboard)
• NPCs that can walk around or interact with the player
• Taking inspiration from Super Mario, you could show a map of a bigger game world at the end of each level
• Items to collect or even buy in shops (with collected tokens or coins)
• Make it an exploration game, a fighting one, or even an RPG? (keeping the 2D platform look)

There’s so much to do, it’s easy to get into something too complicated and run out of time.

This video explains the most common game design mistakes, it’s worth watching before you try one of the more advanced ideas.

Here is a portal back to the index page.

If you have an idea of something you would like to work on with your teammates - great! Otherwise, you can also explore the other pathways, perhaps they will inspire you.

Either way, good luck, have fun!