Level Design
Level Design
The job of level design in Go! Save the Queen! Is too not only make an enjoyable experience for the player but also simplify the added depth of the genre, as to not overwhelm them with differences from their traditional tower defense experience. This causes the level design to be quite difficult.
Enemy Spawns
In a normal tower defense game, spawning enemies is remarkably easy, you just have to decide how many enemies you want to spawn and when. In Go! Save the Queen! though, there is so much more to it. Spawning enemies willy-nilly, without proper telegraphing or not preparing the player, can cause such a frustrating and awful experience. If the queen goes to a new area, you can’t spawn too many enemies at once, otherwise, the player can’t get enough defense in time and gets unfairly punished; at the same time though, if the enemies are coming from one direction, or are funneled down a single path, you can spawn more; but you also have to keep in mind how much money the player will normally have, less money, fewer enemies, more money, more enemies. What I just described is less than a 3rd of what goes into one enemy spawn, in levels that tend to have more than 80 (excluding duplicates which can inflate the number well beyond 100).
The Story of the Level
Another part of level design is making sure it makes sense, that the player can tell what the queen can do, or at least isn’t completely lost when it does happen. For example, the first 5 levels of the game have you protecting a corgi, nothing special about it, just a corgi in a park. So when the player is protecting it, they should get a reason as to why the corgi stops, or why the corgi speeds up. For example, it should speed up in long stretches of nothing because dogs like to run or stop near a cake because dogs like eating. Stuff like this helps the player, not only understand what is happening but also helps let them focus on other aspects of the game they need to focus on, like enemies and obstacles.