5 years. That's how much time has passed since I last created a level in a full-length game. And honestly, I somehow managed to forget how much I flat-out enjoyed it. Doesn't everyone have that one activity which they enjoy doing more then they probably should? Mine just happens to be level design, a fact that I've struggled to remember over the last few years.
Actually, it may not be so much that I forgot about it, but more that a series of events drove me away from it over the last few years. Up until this point, I was honestly putting off the development of the first level in our game. I don't know why, except somehow I ended up with the idea in my mind that it was going to be incredibly tedious. Having put in a fair amount of time into the creation of the level now, I would consider it anything but.
So I started thinking back to my previous games to try and remember why I had such a low interest in level design recently. I clearly remembered it being my favorite part of creating my previous games, so when did I give it the chance to rub me the wrong way? The answer became pretty obvious when I realized the last time I worked on a major project, the infamous final 10% of my largest project ever. Play-testing, cleaning up levels, fixing bugs, adding scenery, minor tweaks and improvements; all things that I considered extremely tedious at the time despite being very important. That was it, completing my previous game had made me decide to take a break; but, it wasn't just that. I didn't get to do very much level design in that last 10% either. All I could remember when I finished, was all the grinding that I had to do at the end of the game, as opposed to the fun parts I got to do throughout.
Pretty ambitious for a kid who didn't know how to write a function.
But let's backtrack a little more first because I can't fully place the blame on that last 10%. I have a very bad habit of wanting all of the art and music for a level before actually developing it (let's say for inspiration purposes). Now when I was creating fan-games with Game Maker, this wasn't a huge issue. I just hit upVG Music to get the music, and Spriters Resource to get the art. Now that only got me so far, but thanks to the help of awesome strangers on the internet, I managed to put together my assets piece by piece. Matching tilesets and backgrounds were a bit harder to come by though, and I probably wasted hours upon hours looking for good artwork for my game. This increased my development time by ridiculous amounts and to put it simply, it was tedious.
This focus of developing levels with the proper graphics first slowed my development to a crawl, unfortunately I didn't notice that until pretty much just now. And the only reason I noticed was because I found myself making the exact same mistakes and doing the exact same things all over again this time around. Initially I was trying to make this game by myself, artwork and everything. It wasn't until Jason came on board and made me realize that what I was doing wasn't necessary or smart. It was time for me to ditch my ego and, instead of trying to do it all myself, leave the art to a professional. This is easily the smartest decision I could have made as it allows me to focus on the things I actually excel at, development and level design. The best part is, I can already notice it making an improvement.
I always considered game development something that I could do on my own, but realistically it shouldn't be. I'll be able to make a better quality game by learning to properly use my team's strengths instead. A one man show is really convenient at first, until you realize how much time you're wasting by doing it.
Shout-outs to aperson98 and NecroToad from DKC Atlas. The DK Bay wouldn't have been the same without your help :)
