Exercise Two: Voodoo Dungeon

After I generated some puzzles and concepts for the Voodoo dungeon I started piecing things together to make very rough map outlines. I decided I would try something new in designing levels for this semester so thought it might be useful to very quickly block out shapes and sizes in Maya. I drew up some shapes and rooms to get an idea of the scale and overall shape on the dungeon. From there I could rotate them camera up 90 degrees to look straight down on the stage and import the image into Photoshop.

This very quickly gave me something to work from, I could annotate and draw notes on each room of the model and add/subtract areas I saw appropriate. With all the annotations and adjustments made I could start drawing around the model to fill out a 2D map of the 1^st floor of the dungeon. I hadn’t decided exactly what the contents of each room would be at this stage, so as I went along and filled in each room I brainstormed and came up with some different puzzles and obstacles the rooms could have.

From my earlier Reverse Level Design exercise, I knew it was important that my level should be communicated efficiently to anyone who read it. When I reverse designed God of War I soon found out that rooms with trickery geometry and puzzles were very difficult to communicate from a top down perspective. The most obvious solution would be to draw a 3D map of the stage but with the size of this dungeon, a full 3D map would just look too confusing. Instead, I decided to take the rooms I felt might look a bit confusing from a flat down perspective and created small 3D diagrams of their interior, making it (hopefully) alot clearer and easier to understand. 

The diagram on the left is the original version of the room on the right. The perspective seemed a bit confusing so the room diagram was recreated from a clearer perspective on the right.

I knew I had to come up with an overall objective for the dungeon and not just sorely rely on the ‘Get Boss key, beat boss formula’. Taking into consideration both the Carry Ball and the Voodoo theme of the dungeon I created a concept where the player would have to catch three Houngan (Male Witch Doctors) and carry them into cells which they would then have to present in the main hall of the dungeon to make the path to the boss. The boss of the dungeon could be either the leader of the Houngan’s or some kind of entity they worship. The important point in this objective is that the player needs the new special item to complete the dungeon, so it’s not just a secondary pointless object.

The first floor of the Voodoo dungeon is an introduction to the setting/feel of the stage before the real objective is shown to the player. I selected some of the basic Zelda mechanics (hookshot, bombs, bow etc) that the player would have at this stage of the game. The range of equipment the player has for this dungeon would probably place it mid-way into a full Zelda game.

I got the basic shape of the 2D map from the blockmap I created in Maya and then added the little icons to represent items or enemies. I created several unique mechanics for the Voodoo dungeon; the two worth mentioning are the Voodoo Portals and Voodoo Curses.

The Voodoo Portals are large masks on the walls of certain rooms. When awoken their mouths open revealing a green portal inside which the player can step into. The portal will take player to another Voodoo Portal somewhere else in the room. This mechanic is introduced on the first floor very briefly in Room 8.

The Voodoo Curses will be introduced on the second floor. They basically manipulate the environment into a confusing puzzle and the player must locate the mask that controls the curse and shoot it with an arrow. Doing so will return the world to normal. A similar idea takes place early in the dungeon in Room 2, the entrance hall. The large entrance door can only be opened by shooting the correct masks littered around the hall.

The second and third floors will revolve mainly around catching the Houngan’s which will open the pathway to the boss and the end of the dungeon. Whilst revising or populating some of the rooms I made sure that all of the equipment the player has is used regularly to make sure the dungeon has variety and surprise.