Third Person Shooter Update 6: "Alpha Mask Striker" Level Design & John Romero Research Material

Been a while since an update, exactly a month actually! but "Alpha Mask Striker" now has a complete Level Design and is now fully white blocked. It took a while but the level is pretty large, and ranges to around 20-30 minutes of gameplay, possibly more dependent on the player. "Alpha Mask Striker" is the game's new title by the way, came up with it so I had a more interesting name than Third Person Shooter Project.

The feedback I got from my 3D platformer was that the level you play around in didn't feel like it was actually designed as an actual level. For the most part this is correct, I ran out of time so I used what I made for the test level and connected it to two platforming challenges, which were rushed. So this time around I was asked to properly design a level for the game. 

I already know how to design a level for a game, but before I began I decided to check how notable level designers in the industry go about designing levels. What I found was a whole video series of game industry legend John Romero, where he discusses the creation process behind the original Doom including reasoning for his level design. John Romero if you haven't heard of him is the co-founder of id software and a designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. All three of which are exceptional games for their time and led to establishing the first person shooter genre. 

You can watch the video series for yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV6HlBa88js&index=2&list=PLF-Nf60AUpykRCzGVGwt8Bt5JnQA8Qz8N

As for documenting a level design, I will show in engine screenshots of the block map while annotating them, explaining what is happening in that area in terms of enemy placement, navigational choices and directions, secrets and narrative. With the level being quite large I'm going to separate the level design screenshots and annotations into another blog post. I have all the screenshots I need, about 35 of them. I'm just in the process of annotating them and formatting them for the blog posts.