Hello and welcome back to Moments in Time weekly devlog! As you might have noticed, our game page has been updated to better reflect the game's final design. This is not final. The game page will be updated more as the updates go live. Today, we'll take a look at the game level design process.

From the very beginning, we always wanted the game not as a set of levels, but one big area that players can discover and return to whenever they want. This brings a very interesting design challenge: the level must be easy enough to understand when the player first discover it, but also not feel boring when they go to it again in the future. There is no definite set of rules when it comes to design a giant level, so we have to figure it out on our own. These steps came out of our personal research and based on our experiences while working on this game.

The first step in designing giant level is to figuring out the core mechanics, arrange it, and lay it out in breadcrumbs. We don't want the player to feel overwhelmed by dropping entire mechanic all at once at the start of the game, so we plan ahead the sequence the player will follow. For example: in the game, the player must learn how to shoot first, before learning how to rewind. 

The second step is to figure out the options player have at every moment in the game.  What happens when the player unlock Rewind ability? Where they can go next? Is there any alternatives? This is when Mark Brown's Dependency Chart from Game Maker's Toolkit come in handy, as it will list and arrange player's sequences through a non-linear game world.

The final step is the real hard work, putting every tiles on the game world and figuring out a gating mechanism to block and unlock player's path. This part requires training and references from a lot of games in this genre, such as Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, and Super Metroid.

Level design is not easy, but it's not impossibly difficult. It takes time, energy, and love for the game you're making. With that being said, that's the end of this week devlog! Tune in every week for our new devlog!