Hillbilly Hunting
What is this?
Who was involved?
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Can I play this?
A large aspect of TGiAR is backtracking through rooms that have been completed before. It is important to keep these room interesting so each room has multiple paths that the player can take. They first time through a room the player will take the easier path, but as their skill and abilities expand they will be able to take the more difficult path.
You can here:
3 Pillars of Level Design
Keep Surprising Them
Since the gameplay is so simple it would be easy for it to get boring. Introducing interactions and making sure each one was more absurd then the last was a theme I wanted to keep. It was difficult to keep the game in a place where all of these absurd don't just make it a joke, but I think the combination of the forest environment and threatening bosses keep it from becoming just a sequence of gags.
Always Give Them Something
to Shoot
Walking in a low-poly forest is not that interesting by itself, and all of the fun mechanics are locked behind using the gun, because of this I wanted to incentivize them to always be using it. Animals are every where, which give the player money when killed which make their guns better.
Preemptively Tell Them
Where to Go
I never wanted the player to not know what to do next, so I made sure that the player say the next path before it was open. In players first walk through the forest they will see the fox door and the crow door, and won't know how to open them. After they kill the fox boss the door will open to revel the path to the crow shrine, so before even fighting a boss the player knows the next two places they have to go.
Old vs. New
HillBilly Hunting was one of my first real level design projects, and as such I had a very ambitious vision in my head. I was going to create the best level anyone had ever seen, but I of course hadn't developed the skills yet and it did not turn out great.
The old map for Hillbilly Hunting vs the new ones.
Hillbilly Hunting wasn't just a chance to show off my better level comprehension, but my improvements in Unreal Blueprints also. The animal, gun, and systems are very modular, so if I ever wanted to add more things it would be easy to do so.
I was given a chance to go back and remake it with the skills I have learned over the couple of years. I made actual progression where the enemies get more intense but the player scales with them to create a balanced difficulty curve. The shrines are placed so that the player can see them at the beginning so they know where their goals are. There are 5 bosses, each with a unique ability to keep the game engaging.
