Max's Portfolio

For Stop Playing my Game!, the levels were all to be built in a standardized chunk that is hexagonal in shape, with one exit and entrance. The ultimate goal of the player is really just to get themselves through the exit. Given that, much of my early inspiration for the levels came from arena style maps found in Quake 3 arena and Sven Co-op.

Levels 1 (pictured right), 2 (pictured above), and 5 (pictured below) especially drew on the ideas of an arena, with a central area of importance, surrounding paths the player could take, and various hazards scattered around the room.

For the sake of variety, I also wanted to make maps that didn’t draw from the arena idea, and so I turned to more general level concepts to work with. Level 3 is a literal maze, Level 4 has you doing parkour, and Level 6 has you on a track running laps.

Normally, I would iterate with the designs, change them up, and greybox them to get a sense of what they should be, but this project was a little special. The whole schtick of the game was that it was unfinished, and so my process differed a bit. I would brainstorm for longer than I normally would, and generally try to make the levels in one go as opposed to iterations. This helped give the appearance of being unfinished without being bad to play.

Breaker-47, on the other hand, was a bit more standard in terms of my process. This game featured locations that you could find in everyday life, namely an apartment that I’ll be using as an example. So, I drew inspiration from the layouts of whole floor apartments in cities like New York or Chicago, whilst also incorporating the look and feel of a townhome (the kind of setting I’m intimately familiar with).

I approached the design of these levels in a much more traditional sense, beginning with rough outlines via Grayboxing, tweaking that, and moving to a more detailed layout with better visuals. The Grayboxing took about a third of the time that detailing did, and the most noteworthy part of that was how much I had to downsize the level because I realized that the rate I was scaling levels at would be to much to reasonably do given the circumstance.