One of the biggest issues regarding AENB's initial release was the very empty and hard to navigate environment. Realizing this now, level design has always been a lacking part of every game jam that I've worked on. Levels almost always get pushed to the final days if not final hours of our projects. I think this has caused a lot of our games to suffer, and it's definitely something that I'm personally going to target in any upcoming jams.

For this upcoming update, renovating the level environment has become one of the key content focuses, with the rest of development focusing on bug fixing or back-end aspects.

So What Went Wrong with V1.0's Map?

The main complaints we ended up getting were:

• It's hard to navigate.
• I can't find enough resources.
• The Map Feels Too Empty.

Lets discuss each issue one at a time, and how I'm working to remedy them.

Navigation is difficult.

One of the first ideas was to create monuments, landmarks of some kind. These would hopefully make navigation easier, since the map was extremely plain, and everything looked intensely similar. But I then realized that the camera didn't have enough screenspace to fit in any new elements. So I pulled the camera back, gave the player more visual information, and with that change along navigation was already way better. That doesn't mean the map didn't need changes, but it also shows that these are multi-faceted issues.

A screenshot of the currently in development minimap radar.

So while being able to see more at once is already a step towards improving navigation, there are much more things at play. Making the level design more distinct in memorable is important as well, but both of these things don't matter if you haven't memorized where you are yet. You can see things, and you know that places are different than other places, but you likely won't have a sense for how they all relate to each other. So the easiest solution is creating a map. In the new version of the game, there is now a minimap that appears in the corner of the screen.

There's a pretty good chance that a fullscreen map will also be created, but its not the highest priority as of the moment. I do think it would be valuable however, and its definitely worth addressing for this upcoming release or a mini-release afterwards.

I can't find enough resources.

Resources were initially thrown all over the place, into seemingly random spots. They were placed in clusters and along pathways, but if you didn't follow every footstep trail it was extremely unlikely that you would find anything.

The UI menu upon interacting with the escape rocket.

In order to beat the game, you needed to acquire 50 iron & gold bars, 50 coal, and a singular quest item hidden somewhere in the map. The quest item is definitely a missed mark itself, but that will be addressed in the addition of quests.

A screenshot featuring gold, iron, coal, and stone deposits.

Available on the map were 7 Gold Nodes, 14 Iron Nodes, 25 Coal Nodes, and 53 Stone Deposits. Gold and Iron nodes both dropped a singular ore, coal would drop in stacks of 10, and stone in stacks of 10 aswell. Gold and Iron would also need to be smelted into bars,

Ignoring all the other items, beating the game needs 50 iron bars, gold bars, and coal. There were not nearly enough of those resources available immediately on the map. In order to beat the game, you would need to get a mining unit operation going, and from that point you would have infinite iron, gold, and coal. New players however wouldn't know this, and you also had to set up the machines in a very specific, unintuitive way. None of this was explicitly told to the player in a clear and easily graspable way. I myself didn't know how the machine system worked, and for that first morning of release I assumed the system broke during compiling, since I had placed the right machines- but I had placed them on the right side instead of the left side of the mining unit, and didn't know the grabber (a transport machine) needed to be rotated in order to go on that side- I had assumed it was omnidirectional. Lot of QOL stuff that can be fixed up with that system, but that really isn't the focus of this post.

A zoomed out screenshot of the entire map.

Take a look at this image above. Each tiny yellow square represents some kind of resource. There are a lot of resource deposits which have no pathway leading towards them, with just a plain, pink void. There is absolutely nothing guiding the player towards these clusters. They would have to walk around aimlessly in order to find them.

So one of the key goals for the map update is to place more resources around. The minimap highlights whenever there's any resource in your vicinity, so that should help finding them a whole lot clearer. Additionally, I plan on adding some caves, mountains, and a quarry into the final map. These distinct areas should help finding resources a lot easier.

And one last thing regarding these resources, the drop rates were just too low from each node. We'll be doing some balance tweaking to how that works, on top of other changes to the overall item system that should shake things up.

The map feels too empty.

A big issue with the initial release is that for a majority of the map, there is absolutely nothing visible on your screen.

The zoomed out map, with red areas representing OUT OF BOUNDS, and blue representing empty areas.

I edited this visual of the game map. As the caption states, the red sections are out of bounds. A giant invisible barrier blocks you from reaching those areas. The blue sections represent empty space. Parts of the map where the background is largely just blank, pink tile.

So the map needs to get populated with a lot more stuff. But that stuff can't just be more of the same tree sprites and other dead shrubbery that currently exists. I need to create visually distinct areas, each with a unique thematic.

So the first step in doing that is creating designs for the new regions as a whole, rather than the little tiny assets that will populate them first. I took that latter approach to design the initial environment, and I just kind of assumed it would all come alive in-game. This time, I'm taking a mock-up first approach. Here's a sneak peak at the upcoming Lab Environment:

a mockup of the in development lab environment

These lab sections will have a much larger role to play once I add in the game's quest journal, along with other features. For now, it's just a pretty backdrop which I get to test new enemies inside of.

But that's pretty much as much as I can show for now! I'll share more as things develop.