The Story Begins - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 313

We also included booby traps in this level, even though the planned progression for the game
doesn't include them by this stage. Sometimes, a vertical slice may include (or exclude) features,
to make sure that a single level can give a good account of the game. It also gives us the chance to
show you how they work. So for the purposes of the example level, we will not only include traps,
but act as if they are already familiar to the player.
Micro Curves
Difficulty curves apply on a micro level, too, so we now have to carefully design up this level with
our new features in mind. It will make sense to start off with a single pirate that needs to be
dispatched using the new charge ability. Archie will explain to Flynn and the player how the new
charge move works:
Archie: Send me out to distract the brute, and when he's not looking, charge him from behind
using the Control key. Push him over the edge, but watch out for that saber.
The charge is the last move Flynn gets and is more advanced than any of the earlier ones.
The player has to charge an enemy from behind or he'll be hurt by the monster's weapon, so we
nearly always need to use Archie to set this up. Enemies don't automatically die once they have
been charged either—they have to be pushed into danger. The simplest form of danger is falling
off a platform, so this is a good way to set up the player's first conflict.
Our job will be to teach the player the different ways that they can use the charge, such as
pushing enemies onto spikes instead of from platforms and dealing with two baddies at the same
time, and so on. To make confrontations even harder, we can also start to mix the charge ability
with challenges the player is already familiar with, such as hazards and moving platforms.
We'll make sure that many of the enemies on this level need to be dealt with using the
charge, so that we know the player has practiced this move a lot before he meets the boss.
There is some variety to the enemies Flynn meets in this level. Some of them you actually
have to talk to in order to progress. The two types are visually different to help distinguish them.
The kill-on-sight enemies are skeletons, and the ones the player can circumvent look human.
They are also audibly different, in that the skeletons have strange guttural sounds, while the
human ones can speak (albeit using text).
Walkthrough
At this stage of the design process, a designer would often create plans of the layout of the level,
along with a description of how to complete it. This is often called a walkthrough , and you're
probably familiar with the concept from web sites that do the same thing after a game is released
to show players how to complete them. We're going to provide a walkthrough of how to complete
the level, which is illustrated by the actual graphical plan of the level (Figures 13-4 and 13-5), but
it could just as easily have been a rougher set of sketches produced by the designer before the
level was created.