Juan Pablo Benitez
Level Designer
Highway 2000
In Highway 2000 players get 3 mechanics to avoid obstacles. They can either strafe left or right, double jump, or accelerate. These are the player’s 3 tools to dodge anything the game throws at them. Players must master them if they want to see the end of the level.
Highway 2000 is a game that keeps asking Can you?
Can you land on this platform? Can you jump these spikes? Can you get that shield? Can you dodge left? Dodge right? Can you finish the Level?
And when your answer to all these questions is yes, the game will ask you one last thing; Can you do it again faster?
Are you going to say no?
While working on this project I:
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Created a complex set of movement mechanics for the player.
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Tweaked said mechanics to revolve around the feeling of maintaining control at high speeds.
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Crafted a finely tuned risk and reward system that revolves around shield pickups.
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Iterated on the levels by designing them as challenges and testing them until I achieved the experience I wanted.
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Designed and implemented several obstacle types.
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Committed to creating an experience I call The Knife's Edge of Speed.
Risk vs Reward
On the second level, players must choose between the left or right platforms. Not only they have to make their choice in a split second but also they have to time their jump precisely as there are spikes on both sides. Adding to this I also placed a shield pickups close to them, so bolder players are rewarded with an extra hit.
Despite this I wanted players to feel confident about accelerating, so to encourage them to do so I placed the platforms in a way that makes it easier to land on them if they are accelerating. Now players feel more empowered the faster they are going.
Left platform
Reaction Time
Other than having no camera control, players have to deal with another limitation. They can not stop or even slow down. They can only go faster or return to their original speed. Because of this players are forced to react at the pace set by the game.
On the second level, I capitalize on this by always having an obstacle in front of the player, so they have to constantly dodge a new obstacle. To encourage players to accelerate, I spaced out the obstacles so that the “rhythm” at which they approach the player feels more natural when accelerating, at the expense of less reaction time.
Knife's Edge of Speed
The game throws obstacles at the player in specific patterns. Here, for example, the player jumps then dodges right, then jumps again then dodges left, rinse and repeat. To keep players on their toes I disrupt the pattern so they have to not only react in time but also fight their urge to follow the pattern they have learned.
For the last section of the game, however, I wanted the players to feel on the knife’s edge of speed. To give them a chance to test just how fast they can strafe. Players are forced to accelerate while they are on this green section. I placed the obstacles on a pattern without cheats. This section rewards players that have mastered the controls and truly are one with the game. At the very end, however, I added one last jump in case they were getting too comfortable.
Highway 2000 was a solo project I started and finished in a single quarter. In order to make this game a reality in such a short time, I needed to stick to strict design disciplines to achieve this goal.
Top view of sections of the third level. Each one introduces a new obstacle type
Efficient Level Design
The levels in the game were designed to force the player out of the position they currently are in. I achieve this by putting obstacles in the path of the player. If the player can not react fast enough they will crash into the obstacle taking a hit.
Obstacles are presented in a three-part method.
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First I introduce a new obstacle with plenty of time to react to it.
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Second I introduce it again but I increase the difficulty by giving the player less time to react.
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And finally, I give the player a different obstacle that they have previously encountered before with even less time to react to it. I then repeat the cycle again. With this method, I can quickly introduce new obstacles to the player without overwhelming them.
Iteration
In order to get the responsive controls that I needed, I was forced to build and rebuild them several times. I did this because I wasn’t satisfied with earlier versions.
This, however, helped me refine my controls so that they felt responsive and bug-free. I applied this same philosophy to all other mechanics in the game. Leaving me with a game that was mostly bug-free as well.
While in development the project name was Space Jam 3 and it stuck all the way to post. If it weren't for legal reasons it would have stuck too. Oh well.
No Sunken Cost
I wasn't scared of scraping content no matter how much time I dedicated to it. Instead of wasting time trying to shoehorn in a feature that didn’t fit or did not add much to the experience; I would instead remove it from the game and invest that time on more promising features.
Early iterations of the game had checkpoints throughout the levels, this allowed players to get back to the point they died faster and kept them from replaying easier parts of the level.
I opted against this and used shields the player could pick up instead. However, they would start with no shields. Thus they would have to actively pick up shields in order to get a second chance. Now the game felt more forgiving and gave players a secondary goal of picking up shields.
Optimization
Given the limited amount of time I had to finish the project, I needed to find ways of speeding up the design progress.
I created modular assets with readily modifiable variables. This customization allowed me to quickly prototype sections for the levels, test them out and if I felt they were engaging and challenging enough I would add them to the level.
Blueprinting
At first, because I was working by myself I didn’t worry about leaving comments on any of my blueprints.
I thought “Why waste my limited time commenting my own logic? I’m the Juan making them anyway, I know what I'm talking about.” After a few days, I quickly realized I had no idea what any of my blueprints did or how they related to each other.
Trying to remember how everything worked cost me more time than I was saving by not commenting. I started leaving comments as if someone else was supposed to make sense of them. By doing this I wasn’t wasting the average 5 to 10 minutes every time I opened a blueprint I hadn’t worked on for some time.