Before you can begin designing a level you need to know what it is you are designing. This only makes sense. If you don’t know if you should be developing the interior of a space ship or the exterior of a cave then you will have a problem right from the beginning. Thus it becomes imperative that you make some key decisions before diving into actually building your 3D world.
The Test did not start out as The Test. I was handed some very basic parameters and given a lot of room to be creative. I’ll list the guidelines I was given:
- The game should be small, only two small levels like the Mission game
- The game should be a first person shooter with slight adventure elements mixed in
- The game would require no scripting at all, but would instead use 3DGS’ new scripting system for non-programmers.
That was about it. The genre of the game was left up to me. I knew that before I could get deep into designing the levels I would have to figure out just what the game would be.