Tiles Apart

Level Designer

Project Information

  • This is a mobile game.
  • Team size: 18 students.
  • Duration: 8 weeks.
  • Tools used: Unity Engine, Google Sheets, Pen & paper.
  • Role: Level designer, prototypes, generalist design.
  • Link to game: Tiles Apart for Android

Puzzle Design

While working on the game Tiles Apart I spent a fair chunk of my time working with Level Designers. This was due to the nature of the game; it is a game that has the player solve puzzles in the form of small mazes. This meant an emphasis was put on lots of smaller levels.

I developed the system you can see on the right which allowed us to work with paper prototypes and later convert them to in-engine levels. This allowed the designers to work without engine. Being able to work without the engine was important because the programming team had not fully finished the level design tools when we started working.

Paper Prototype

I often used the pieces from the game "Doolhof / Labyrinth" as they would allow me to prototype more efficiently. After all, it is easier to convince players to test a level when it looks appealing.

Later during development we switched back to pure paper. This allowed me to prototype some additional mechanics that would not be easily possible with the default pieces of "Doolhof / Labyrinth".

Spreadsheets

The level sheet was created to provide the level designers with a tool to show an overview of the currently existing levels as well as the currently implemented level progression. The creation of this tool required three iterations.

  1. On paper: This proved too much maintenance and had scaling issues (Only one person can use this at any given time)
  2. In Excel: Images 'float' in Excel, they do not fit in cells.
  3. Google Sheets: Our final version.

The first image shows the input section of the sheet. The image link is then taken from this tab and used (together with some invisible cells) to create the image galleries as displayed on the second image.

Above: A visualization of all available levels generated from the input data.

Left / Below: The input sheet that is used to generate the images.