New Stage Design (WIP)

The 'hub' design in Tikus Tales consists of different areas of a house, and one of them is a bedroom where a laptop lies on a desk. The plan is for the mouse to somehow activate that laptop, and make his way into a 'computerized' world. That is where this level design comes in.

Creation of the low poly assets on Blender is straightforward enough. However, as usual, level design involves more than just creation of assets. The real challenge is the placing of the different components in a way that enables smooth flow and movement of the character, and not just randomly chucking stuff here and there and call it a day. When level designing something like this, some of the difficulties that I face are:

1) trying to minimize potential 'cheesing' by players: I've lost count of the number of times I play tested the stage, while designing, and discovered I could actually get to places that were NOT supposed to be able to be reached unless a specific path is followed. This is minor though, as I could just move components around and add blockages.

2) coming up with more verticality: Tikus Tales is, first and foremost, a platformer, and a motherboard is pretty much flat with short components. Good thing is, I do not have to abide by 'realistic' rules and can just add random stuff in there to add verticality. I'll try and make them still look like circuit board components.

Of course, plain colors in a stage that's supposed to be 'computerized' is not very exciting, so upon importing to Unity, I'm using Shader Graph to make cool shaders like so:

The stage is still a work in progress with a long way to go, but I can see it being different and hopefully fun.