Level Creation Process

I have been working on custom levels and tooling for HeXaK and want to share my progress and design pattern to both help other game developers and maybe get some feedback on areas of improvement I could make.

HeXaK is a tile placement puzzle/strategy game where a player tries to make the most out of the space and configuration of a level and a limited toolset of tiles.

Currently I am at the very start of the process and most of the maps have been designed around teaching players the basics and small challenges to test them, but now I am designing some of the early harder levels. where the players toolset is still constrained, thus there are some limitations on the tiles I can use - which makes for a fun design challenge.

Step one is to come up with a goal or a test for the player, in this example I want to test that the player understands adjacency bonuses and road connections.

The general Idea of challenge/difficulty - I want this to be quite tough as this will be the last test before introducing the next mechanic.

Using my map generator I can create some rules for the height map and general tile placements:

This will only generate water and land, no mountains (these have not yet been introduced yet).

Next is define a size - considering I want to test both adjacency and road connections, I will want a larger size, and maybe a horizontal map as many of the previous are square.

After generating about 50 different maps I got this one:

I like the idea that the top of the map could have a goal and there are two main ways to get to it, so the player will have to plan and route through/near areas that have a higher adjacency potential. 

Next I clean up the map with my tile editor to get to something similar to the idea that the generated map inspired. 

When building editor tooling I feel that it is very important to be able to iterate quickly, so tools like multiple select and undo are very important!.

After some quick small adjustments and some broad brush style ideas I get to this:

Main idea is to try to guide the player to a solution like:

Another feature I added to my custom levels is the ability to spawn buildings, this helps me both guide players and to help force play styles or patterns - so I will add the HQ and some minerals, inverting the original idea, but keeping the same feel:

My main thoughts and Ideas at this early stage are:

• Area 1 is for power generation and a potential area for the player to try out different patterns,
• Area 2 is a choice between minerals or more lands space
• Area 3 is far away and can be seen as an obvious choice as there is limited land
• Area 4 is close, but if the player uses all of it the the tiles behind are unreachable - this may help players understand that you can build on top of minerals to use the space rather than get the points, which is a valuable lesson

Next step is to play around in the level - the editor generates me a building list of everything in the game with 1000 uses, couple that with quick restarts and undo features I can try different strategies and look for interesting configurations, such as:

At first I thought that the player would not be able to get 6 miners online in this map but with a few changes:

And possible Idea for a solution could look like:

I notice that if we gave an option for a road in the middle we could constrain the amount of roads and further emphasize the planning and routing that we want from this level.

For example:

And this being an example of a winning state:

Next is to limit the inventory that the player gets:

Then is testing and refining, I will use the score from the potential solution above to start with, then try a variety of patterns and placements to try to beat it, this will give me a rough average of the scores possible and a set the target so something around that - once I get the stars system in place then I can create harder optional targets to get 3 stars in a level but for now this will suffice.

Once I am happy I get some friends and family to try out the level, get feedback and take notes to refine it further.

The finished level:

This has a few optional areas to try to mine, but in order to reach both of the bottom mineral patches you need to route your roads carefully, also in order to power and supply all of the buildings with workers you need to use the adjacency bonuses. This meets the goal of the level and the design is non trivial to fresh players.

I know this is not the most scientific of processes, but so far the levels I have been making are quite fun and all have a point that is generally achieved. I try to make the levels open enough to encourage other possible strategies and to prevent issues where there is only one obscure solution that is an unfun ordeal to find. I very much enjoy players finding solutions that I did not design and embrace it wherever I can.

HeXaK is available to play in your browser, I am currently finalising the latest update with around 20 levels to play. For now you can try the daily challenge or play a random map.

I would love to hear feedback on this approach and anywhere I could improve or new ideas to incorporate.