Design of War Ender: Level 5-1 and 5-2
Going up.
Infinite Level game discussed: War Ender
WARNING! THIS DEV BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING SECTION OF WAR ENDER!
I'm finding myself in a position where I can't talk about The Future Project as much without starting to dip into spoiler territory. And obviously, it doesn't make sense to be posting spoilers of my own game before it's even released. So, we'll be taking a break from The Future Project discussion for a little while and instead talk about my first game, War Ender. Back when this website was strictly dedicated to War Ender, I started a series of dev blogs analyzing the levels I created for the game and breaking down the design of them, one level at a time. You can see those posts over on The Old Blog if you're curious to see the series beginning. Now, with only a few more dev blogs left for 2022 and with us being at the game's final chapter, it felt appropriate to look at the game another time and check out the game's finale. Since chapter 5 of War Ender doesn't have much in regards to new mechanics, we'll be lumping two levels together for this dev blog, and then cover the rest in the next. Sound like fun? Let's get started!
The story goes that Red just defeated the Outsider Leader, the one who had supposedly started the urban war in The City. However, after defeating him, you find out that not all is as it seems. It turns out, Red's boss Cyrus is the one behind everything. When Red goes to confront him about it, Cyrus immediately orders all personnel to kill Red. He's now trapped in a building full of very bullet happy psychos! But as we've established throughout the series, Red doesn't get locked into rooms with enemies. Rather, enemies get locked in with him. Thus, chapter 5 begins, with enemies featuring Cycorp colors and everything taking place inside Cycorp itself. There's been plenty of indoor levels, but this one has a much different context to it. As you'll soon see, you can even feel that change of context in the level layouts and gimmicks. Of course, the difficulty is also at its highest here, with 5-1 or 5-2 being the most likely the hardest levels in the game. Which one is harder to you is up to individual opinion. I always replay levels before I write about them, but it had been several months since I last played War Ender and I found that 5-1 was really doing me in at first. But, maybe that's just because I was out of practice.
Something you may have noticed about platformers is that, generally, you're going from left to right. "Yes, we knew that" you might say. After all, that's more or less been the standard since Super Mario Bros. on the NES. But have you ever really thought about that? Comparitively few levels in platformers go right to left or up and down. War Ender doesn't buck the trend either, it largely does the same thing. However, occasionally you might get a chance to do a more vertical level, usually taking place indoors. The key thing here is outdoor levels are horizontal, while indoor levels tend to be more vertical. This isn't strictly true of all levels, whether in War Ender or any other platformer. Some outdoor levels have moments of verticality to them, and many indoor levels are a hybrid of horizontal and vertical. But for the most part, a platformer level tends to fall into horizontal or vertical layouts.
Chapter 5 of War Ender, the final levels of the game, take War Ender's vertical platforming in particular and take it to their logical extremes. There's plenty of horizontal based levels, especially in 5-3 when we get to that, but for the most part the chapter 5 levels go up and down. 5-1 demonstrates this almost immediately by putting you in the center of a room and asking you to go left or right to fall down onto the next platform. Going all the way left or right will just lead you to a wall. This level is funneling you, the player, on a downward path. I have to be careful with this though, because there are still bottomless pits to fall through here, so it's important to telegraph what's progression and what's a death pit here. You'll notice as you play through 5-1 that moments where you're going down tend to force you to go down, while moments that ask you go to the right will show an area to the right that you can platform to. War Ender isn't interested in cheap deaths, so I tried to make subtle clues that communicate when a pit is safe or not. Additionally, enemy placement goes through a slight change in these sections, as they have to accomodate the fact that the player will be arriving from above. A skilled player can and likely will use Red's shoot-float to take care of enemies before jumping down. For that reason, I tend to place rocket launcher enemies and pyros to further push the player into being strategic about when they jump down or shoot-float.
The remainder of 5-1 proceeds as follows – you'll then have a horizontal section before using moving platforms to climb upwards through Cycorp, then you hit another horizontal section before making yet another climb down. Repeat this one more time and that's more or less the structure of 5-1. Of course, I make sure that three areas aren't exactly the same. They'll each have wildly different platform layouts, obstacles, and enemies to contend with. And as we've established in chapter 4, we're trying to squeeze additional gameplay out of well used enemies by combining and placing them in ways unseen up to this point. Like chapter 4, the point of enemies here is take everything you've learned about them and throw them at you in as many combinations as possible, thus exploring the mechanics of both enemies and the platforming itself thoroughly before War Ender's end. Regarding the story telling aspects of the level design, the idea was to communicate that Cycorp is huge and sprawling, taking Red to various different areas. Additionally, many chapter 5 levels tend to end at upper levels of the level, implying that Cyrus is sealing himself away towards the top of the Cycorp. This is the main reason for 5-1 especially doing this up and down, left and right thing in its design. By the time you complete 5-1, you'll likely feel as Red does...gosh, this place is big!
Our next level is 5-2, is similarly vertical focused, with one notable distinction...it scrolls. There aren't a lot of auto-scrolling levels in War Ender, and there's even fewer that are vertical scrollers. In fact, there's literally only one! Level 5-2 is that only vertical scrolling level, which makes it pretty unique. A fun fact about 5-2 to kick things off – you'll notice that the camera is slightly pulled back a bit here. You can see a bit more area at a time than you normally can in any other level. What's the reason for this? Because while making 5-2, I found that there wasn't enough horizontal space on screen to make a vertical only level as interesting as I had hoped. It's hard to setup interesting platforming or enemy placement when you can only place a few items before you have to move up again. Thus, I pulled the camera back to allow the player to see more area at once, which in turn meant I could do a little more with the level design. Sometimes, what you need is a little change to the camera to make something play a little bit better. Fixes to game design issues aren't usually that simple though.
But anyway, back to the actual level. As the vertical level, everything has to be placed within a specified horizontal space. This also means that the exact placement of objects has to be tailored specifically to this vertical-only environment, and the scrolling speed has to be adjusted to accomodate this style of level. A common theme here is that the player will be running through a short horizontal area in order to get to the next platform that leads upward. There is a lot of moving from right to left, then climbing up, then going right to left, moving up again, rinse and repeat. It's a similar design philosphy to 5-1, but the hoirzontal chunks in particular are very compressed. Enemies are also less abundant here. If you were to divide the level into several Red-sized horizontal pieces, you'll notice that there's usually four enemies at most, with it being more common to be about two. Furthermore, I tend to place those enemies on the other side of the area that Red will appear, sometimes even behind walls so they cannot realistically be reached by the player. 5-2 has a stronger emphasis on platforming overall, with many parts of the level asking that you use jumppads and disappearing blocks to climb up, while also being aware of the low ceiling in many of these places.
It's a very experimental level as War Ender levels go. Most of them follow a basic formula of introducing a gameplay object, whether that be a new enemy or obstacle, allowing the player a moment to get accustomed to that thing, and then focusing the remainder of that level on showing the new gameplay element in a variety of ways. Some levels buck that trend, such as the aforementioned scrolling levels as well as boss levels which are much more focused on creating a big, specialized enemy. Chapters 4 and 5 stop that pattern and instead tend to focus their levels on reiterating everything you've seen so far. 5-2 is then set apart because it's introducing a different type of scrolling level, and contains a radically different level layout as a result. You could almost call the concept of vertical scrolling a sort of obstacle on its own, and according to the overall design of War Ender, you would then expect vertical scrolling to make some appearances in other levels to fully flesh out the idea. But, that did not happen, and instead we get vertical scrolling relegated to this one level. In fairness, there's probably only so many ways to explore this mechanic, so it's likely for the best that this is just in the one level.
As enemy placement goes, 5-2 has my favorite use of the pyros in particular. Throughout War Ender, pyros are typically placed way on the other side of a room, with the idea being that the player must use their dodge to reach them unharmed. Sometimes they're placed slightly above the player to make them time a jump with their shooting to take them out as well. The point is, they have somewhat limited use in level design, but they have a purpose and, combined with other items, can still pose an interesting threat. This level has possibly my favorite use of them, placing them behind walls and making them impossibe to actually defeat in several instances. You have to dodge past the flame wall projectiles as you climb up, and since the vertical scrolling limits how quickly you can travel up, you'll definitely have to contend with these projectiles. I'm quite happy with this use of the pyro. This also has some of the tougher platforming in the level, notably with any segments involving hopping from one destructible platform to the next...or rather, destructible block. The platforms are only one tile wide, about as wide as Red himself. It's a common level design choice in platforming, but I think there's a reason War Ender doesn't do this very often. Red is pretty fast, and precise movement can be tricky. There's a reason most platforms in War Ender are about the size of three Reds placed side by side. It's one of those things that, were the chance to present itself, I would go back and change. But, I'm still overall happy with what's here.
At the end of 5-2, a sort-of cutscene plays where this cube shaped object with blue lightning coming from it appears to "connect" itself to Red and moves itself above him. Nobody's really mentioned this before...what are we looking at? Well, that'll be for next time! Gotta leave you in suspense for the next dev blog, unless you've already completed the game, in which case you already know what it is and how it's involved in the rest of the game. We'll be doing level 5-3 and the final boss of the game in the next dev blog to finish off 2022! Afterwards, we should be back to talking about The Future Project and how things are going on that front. It'll be nice to finally finish the main levels of the Design of War Ender series I started a long time ago. There might still be a few things to discuss here or there, but the main game will at least be covered. I look forward to finishing this with you all.
Until next time!
-Lance T.