Making Angeline Era: A Deep Dive into Overworlds and More
Dev Timeline Part 5 of upcoming Angeline Era!
Hi all, thanks for checking out Part 5 of the Angeline Era Dev Timeline series!
After the events of last devlog (late 2022), we worked to improve the combat - adding stuff like hitstop, or a spin-dash move to the game for parrying. The spin & parrying were scrapped, speaking to the then-underdeveloped combat. Likewise, the level design process was early - it took me 3-4x longer to make a level back then!
Old Levels
Above is an annotated diagram of an unused level. The enemy layouts are dense, requiring killing 6-8 to move on. Nowadays, rooms have secret conditions under which the room is ‘cleared’ by killing fewer enemies. (E.g. killing an odd-one-out, etc)
Levels in Angeline Era usually focus on action or exploration. Occasionally an action level might have optional explorative offshoots, or an exploration level might have surprising moments of action - but in this level there's a weird combination of required exploration AND action - even platforming, evidenced by the grind rails(!) at the end.
Nowadays, the focus of levels is smaller - the interactions of certain enemy types (bats and goats) within a place like cliffs along the sea. By keeping the initial focus smaller, it’s easy to establish a baseline good action level before pushing it into weirder territory through one-off modifications of enemies (making them harder or stranger), arrangements of enemies in poetic ways that convey open-ended meaning, or contain implied, hard-to-articulate logics. We’ve been calling this practice of open-ended action-mechanic and visual-arrangement-based storytelling “setpoems", influenced by various things, such as the humorous/meaningful way enemies are sometimes arranged in Dark Souls 1.
At this point we put together a pause menu, adapting Sephonie's logic. ultimately the visuals changed to something more minimal. You can also see the (now unused) EXP bar on the right.
Developments in the Autocuber
I also improved the Autocuber - our cube-grid-based 3D level design tool. Some additions made here were stuff like a 'search/replace' tool, invisible-wall-autogeneration tools, UV-modifying tools.
Above is a view of the editor after auto-generating invisible walls from certain edge cubes that determine where the player can and cannot go. I think the image is an of an early buggy version, though.
Progress on the Art
Above is an early screenshot. You'll see the Anodyne slimes (from when we considered this Anodyne 3), which became Angeline Era's Bugdogs (visible in trailers). The art style today is similar, but it's a bit less 'realistic' - in that even if objects are repeated next to each other, they seem intentional. (Compare two copies of a realistic tree, compared to two copies of a Pokemon Red tree. Which feels stranger to see?)
Musical Developments
At the end of 2022 I finally uploaded my music to streaming platforms. I also started experimenting with guitar sounds in my music, listening a lot to shoegze-inspired favorites like The Sleepwalk, or doing studies like a Besaid Island remix in the guitar style. (Which is actually documented on Analgesic's Youtube!) Eventually it led to the game's overworld song.
At the start of 2023, I drafted out a handful of song ideas, some boss songs, some forays into gabber with the Quest 64 soundfont - trying to get a feel for what music would fit. Until the level design and art got further, and I knew we’d have faster action stages and relaxed explorative stages, it was hard to feel certain about style/tempo choices.
But level design solidifies over time, so it's good to mess around widely at first. The range of influences for Angeline Era's music (check this spotify playlist I made) are gigantic, but for influences that are newer for me - I listened to some older genres (psytrance/gabber/trance/etc) and also went to a few clubs for music reference. (Check out Bacon Okubo if you're ever in Tokyo...). On the newer end, I've been listening to newer-shoegaze/digicore/soundcloud etc stuff occasionally, but also stuff like 1950's Light Music, or English/Irish folk music, and so on...
A Rant About Action Bosses
Finally, 2023! Early in January I set to making some bosses - the first was the Dullahan you see in the trailer (or this tweet).
Inspired by Ys: Oath, I made a rule that you should always be able to be more aggressive in AngEra’s combat/bosses. Angeline Era's combat feels best when you're going fast and riding on intuition. Using this rule helps the fights feel intense even with AngEra’s simple moveset.
I feel today's action game bosses can err towards smoke and mirrors. You feel scared from fancy animations, but actually you just need to be able to tap parry or roll at the right time to win, or charge up your Anime Attack Meter. Much of the fear comes down to hard-to-read bosses with moves that two or three-shot you, or having to run back to the boss after dying. It’s like the fear of closing a 10-step online-shopping signup form by accident. There’s something bureaucratic and spreadsheet-y about how modern boss design feels, it feels less about physically experiencing a unique feeling that the boss embodies, and more about avoiding huge punishments by memorizing rules that feel arbitrary.
Put another way, we designers need to go and throw a ball around more. Throwing a ball is easy to learn and physically exciting, and it changes based on the ball shape, density, weather conditions. Action isn’t just copying the feeling of movies with their special effects and fancy cameras and choreography. To me, Action should be based around real-life motion: throwing a ball, climbing the stairs.
I want bosses or game combat to return more towards a realm of 'play' and 'movement' rather than the movie-like direction they’ve gone in.
Scrapped Ideas: Badges and EXP
I worked on a 'badge' and EXP system. Neither of these are in the game. Badges are like Paper Mario Badges or Dark Souls rings: you can equip them for abilities. This was too complex for Angeline Era or just plain pointless (is it interesting to wear a +30 HP badge if you just forget about it? Not really.) That sort of stuff works better for turn-based games or heavy role playing games.
EXP eventually got cut because the act of grinding enemies is at odds with the style of levels in the game. That's something that, again, is more expressive/useful in a very 'stat-heavy/build-focused' game like Souls/Paper Mario.
Badges became Artifacts (subweapons, essentially), EXP became Scales (resources you get from clearing certain levels, used to level up). In addition to their immediate uses, Artifacts add some light complexity to combat, Scales help create focus in the game’s pacing! You never know what old ideas will come in handy.
Designing A World-first Overworld
In February 2023 we started working on the Overworld, which lets you enter the various levels. Here's an early version of it:
The primary way this differs from today is the scale is huge! It feels a bit like a weird in-between of a platformer level and a world map. I was interested in this direction at first, but visually it's hard to pull off, and hard to navigate. It’s a decent first shot, but we needed more regular levels to get a sense of what the overworld even needed to do.
At one point we even played with having a ball gun on the overworld to fight with / do puzzles. Interesting but... defocused the core experience too much. Not pictured are also other ideas, like random encounters. Those ideas shifted into Encounter Levels, described a bit later in this post.
Eventually we shrunk the visual scale down. Here’s an attempt at an overworld segment for some levels from early 2023.
It's hard to read, but the Red Arrows represent when a small level is connecting the overworld. The white lines indicate what levels are connected to in the overworld. Blue lines are levels with two entrances.
Here's a version of that mountain area, but with some art. Even though it has a relatively small number of levels, it's made hard to navigate because of constantly entering/exiting levels.
You see, levels used to be made so that when you beat them, you exit to a different part of the world map. This is a little confusing to navigate or understand, especially because we want you to Clear Levels to Find Scales to Level Up. How do you know a level is cleared? Can a Scale Level have two exits? Etc. We needed to clarify definitions.
The above photo is an early 2023 internal demo/playtest's overworld. Through working on this, we realized that one thing that helped was the idea of "Overworld Changers". The overworld can sometimes change - adding a staircase, deleting a tree - when a level is cleared. But which levels? Only levels with Scales. Therefore, there's a logic to the game: Clear a Scale Level, Progress Through the Overworld.
Additionally, for visual clarity - we fixed the camera to this quarter-angle view. You can still rotate the camera within a range, but having this forces both us to design the layout more clearly, but it also makes navigation easier as the player has to worry about less spatial possibilities. This also makes landmarking a lot easier.
(yes! There is no map in this game except a loose world map. Ha ha ha!!!)
To add to the clarity of exploration, you have to search to find every level entrance. It’s usually indicated by an obvious thing on the ground, but by searching for levels it’s easy to see where you’ve been and where you haven’t (versus seeing all the level entrances from the start.) That also creates a sense of mystery!
Of course... this is the progress of development on the overworld. There’s yet to be a finalized Overworld area connected to levels - though I’m making one for the upcoming demo, there will probably be more takeaways in the future. For now, I’m choosing to let the levels influence the overworld (rather than the other way around)
Types of Levels
Around this time - owing to the progress we made with playtesting, world map progress - we discussed and then Marina put together some useful illustrations for the general design direction of levels.
By reducing the level types to Scale or Non-Scale levels, this allows for focus in level design, and a clear player experience. Making progress is obvious: clear a Scale level and it'll change something in the overworld. Non-scale levels can be weirder and open-ended, but because they don't hide progression-blocking things, it doesn't really matter if a player does everything there, or not. There's no concept of '100%ing' a Non-scale level, and that's fundamental for the substance of Angeline Era's atmosphere not feeling like levels are consumable hits of treasure chests to find.
Regarding Encounter Levels - In some ways, "nothing progresses" in these levels. You don't find items, or fight bosses. Instead, it's merely a “little tale” of the world of Angeline Era, told through a small level composed of a few rooms, sometimes enemies, and your ability to bump and shoot stuff. These little and abundant levels will be a key pillar of AngEra’s world, and an important design takeaway for the future of adventure/action games. I’ll have more to say in the future (and you can play some in the upcoming demo!), but, Encounter Levels are inspired by folklore and myth and their open-ended stories, the experience of “encounter” in everyday life and its observations, or, playing and observing the humor/strangeness of enemy placements in games like Bobo the Cat or Dark Souls.
Other Stuff
Other things happened in early 2023 - like opening our merch store and releasing Sephonie on Consoles. We also worked to prepare a demo for playtests/funding applications. We never got funding in the end, but it doesn’t matter because we’ll finish it self-funded, ha ha! The main benefit of that demo thing was getting the store page out early, playtesting, and helping finalize some decisions.
Takeaways
The power of collaboration, I think, is another person having stakes in giving feedback. This leads to more focused revisions, and revisions is the key to a good game - at least earlier in development when you have a lot of time. When I look back at Angeline Era's vague imaginings (2020/2021) and first 9 months (4/2022-12/2022), it's useful how progressing on one part of the game - art, story, game design, level design - helps inform the other.
It seems good to not get attached to nailing down a level design philosophy early on. So much will be cut, condensed, or modified, that it's a bit of a waste to be like 'the levels should be like THIS!' before you even have a dozen made. There are hard-to-articulate things you learn about any game's level design through the process of making the levels. There are improvised moments of wonder that you realize you could try to focus on creating. And those are the things you want to drive the level design principles. It’s okay to make up principles early on to guide you, so long as you know it’s probably temporary!
So thoughtful. I will be sure to enjoy the non-scale levels without stressing out.