Development diary #2

Hi there! Keen to know how we are developing levels for “Letters - a written adventure”? :-)
First of all it’s important to know that there are only three developers in our team - Aleksandra (programming), Selina (art) and Martina (level & sound design). This means we had to master the skill of multitasking. So, back to our levels!

Basically there are two different types of levels - paper and desktop. Both of them are really fun to design, but they require slightly different approaches. Paper levels are usually one page, so the amount of content we can put there is limited. Desktop levels feel almost like an open world compared to them because we can open, close or reopen as many windows as we like.This is also why desktop levels are much bigger and have more complex logic.



For both variants it all starts with the narrative line. We know what the main topic of the level is and what events should happen there. This also means we know which of the main NPCs will be there.
Then Martina begins to design a first draft of a Mock-up, it takes about two days till it’s ready for the first review meeting. Usually, we change about 60-70% of the draft during the meeting and Martina edits the Mock-up again. It could go through a couple more iterations, but eventually we arrive to a Mock-up we like. It looks like this:



Then Aleksandra starts building a simple prototype with placeholder assets and tests the level in Unity. Typically at this stage we see that a couple of things are not working as good as we expected or that some riddles are just not good enough. It means a new iteration again, but often the last one. Ok, sometimes we come back to the levels we did a year ago and redo some parts of it. We love how the game is coming together after all these small changes and touches here and there.



After testings and reviews Selina is ready to start creating visual assets for the game. We use Spine for almost all animated assets - it’s a great skeleton animation software, especially if you want to create something with many skins (texture variants).
In paper levels all the drawings also have a “sketch” effect - we change skins every 0.8 seconds achive this pencil-sketchy line effect. We’ve tried out a shader version of such an effect, but it was not that neat in comparison to the skin change. So we settled on this version.



At this stage, when we already have some of the visuals, Aleksandra also starts to show the level to people outside of our little studio and makes further iterations if needed.

Meanwhile Martina is very busy with dialogs for the level. I will not write a lot about our dialog system now, it deserves a separate post, but for a paper level there are approximately 100-200 sentences and two or even three times more for the desktop levels. Aleksandra is busy assigning dialog IDs to corresponding NPCs. And then test again to be sure all the dialogs landed where they are supposed to be. Actually, Aleksandra usually writes something funny (ok, she thinks it’s funny) for NPCs before they receive proper dialogs. Because it makes testing a little bit more entertaining. If one day you play “Letters” and some drawings respond with “Hamilton” (musical) lyrics, you should know that you just encountered a bug - forgotten dialog ID and Aleksandra’s humor.



Back to the almost done level! Martina is switching her role again, now she’s a sound designer! She records and edits sound effects for NPCs and puts them in a FMOD project - another third party product we enjoy using. We have procedural dynamic music (created by Michel Barengo) and also dynamic NPC’s sfx.

Looks like all the components are there. So Aleksandra is finalising the demo and polishes it just a bit. At the same time Martina is already creating a draft for the next Level.



Hope you enjoyed the reading! Our twitter is full of other gifs if you liked these ones ;-) And Discord is full of developers of “Letters”!
P.S: we're live on Kickstarter!