Standpoint

Standpoint is out on Steam. A game I worked on is out on Steam!

StandPoint is a first-person puzzle platformer where the player controls the direction of gravity to navigate the 5 stages of grief, while dodging lasers and solving puzzles.

I was tasked with the level design for Anger, Bargaining, and Depression. It was certainly a challenge trying to convey these emotions only using the level-design, especially since assets for each level were the same other than the color. But, a good designer builds the best game he can with the tools available. This is our army and with this we will be victorious!

As a quick overview

• Anger focused on moving quickly, dodging lasers, and breaking glass. This section was all about action!
• Bargaining often gave the player the option to choose his path and complete either an action segment or a puzzle segment. The player also learned to navigate boxes through mazes without touching them.
• Depression led the player through wide open, lonely spaces, burdened him by making him carry several boxes with him wherever he went, and had puzzles the player needed to solve by committing suicide to jump back to the latest checkpoint.

What am I most proud of?

Probably I’m most proud of how many different levels I was able to make with so few game mechanics. Aside from shifting gravity and lasers, there are switches the player can press to open doors, boxes the player can carry around and leave on switches, moving platforms, a few tools to force the direction of gravity, and glass the player needs to be falling fast enough to break through. There are 20 stages in the game, and I don’t think there are many segments where the player is thinking “meh, I’ve done this already.”

Best Puzzle?

This one I stumbled upon by accident as a bug with an earlier segment I was working on. Then I thought “hey, this would work great as something the player actually needs to figure out how to do!”

The player comes to the segment already bringing a Box A with him. Leaving it on switch X to open the gate, he should then go spawn Box B, then return to switch X and replace Box A with Box B. Bringing Box A through the gate, he can now re-spawn Box B (closing gate X) and now has both boxes to proceed through gates Y,Z.

What is my favorite segment?

Probably the segment I have the most fun playing through (and I’ve played through everything so many times!) is one of the action-oriented segments at the end of Bargaining 3.

In Standpoint the player cannot jump. When all 4 walls are covered with lasers, the player needs to shift gravity at the right moment so he is falling in midair when passing through the ring.

By the time the player reaches Bargaining 3 he has done this dozens of times. But now there is a long hallway with three sets of laser-rings coming at various speeds. Sometimes the player will need to back up so he falls through all the rings when they pass through each other, which just feels really good to do.

Important Lessons Learned?

I suppose my biggest take-away from the project is a sense of confidence. This was my first paid job that involved level design (as opposed to game design, system design, economy, etc), and the feedback from the project lead was fantastic: “dudde. me and dan are just gushing about these levels”

Of course, there were many important level design lessons I was reminded of along the way:

• Planning is paramount! Games need to have a proper difficulty curve, and that’s much easier to implement if you plan ahead instead of trying to tweak the difficulty of all the segments after they’ve been put in place.
• Simplicity! If a new game mechanic or asset type doesn’t add something significant to the game, it’s probably better to do without it.
• If a segment is not good enough, cut it! Better to have a shorter game than players quitting half-way because a segment isn’t fun.
• A huge portion of the time needed to build good levels is spent playing them.
• You will be much better at the game than the average player.
• Everything takes longer than you expect it to
• I can still work until 4am if need be 🙂