Huanian Game Meta Designer

Huanian Game Meta Designer is made by Richie Kho Hui Huan in Godot Game Engine for pure focus on structuring game content ideas and facilitate game content creation.

Oftentimes, in the process of developing a game, creating content, or making a level is the greatest obstacle, as it dictates the value of each mechanic that you have implemented so far. In so many occurrences, game developers tend to design and implement features head first before thinking about how they will play out in the gameplay that is experienced by the player. This is discouraging when the game features are actually not as useful and fun as it seems when the demo level is created. Sometimes the game feature itself is to blame, but most of the time, the demo level is probably not designed to emphasize the use case of the aforementioned features. When we plan game features in advance of game level, it feels like making a solution without a problem. In the end, the game features, or the capability that is given to the player, are just tools to overcome the puzzle; the puzzle itself is the entity that made up a game. Although the capabilities are important to solve a puzzle, without a puzzle, the capabilities are meaningless.

Designing levels are putting different variations of locks and keys together. Locks in this context are any form of obstacles while keys are any form of solution that overcomes the obstacles. To make the level fun, there must be optimal exposure of discovery of variations of locks and keys. Too much exposure to discovery will cause overwhelm. Imagine when you are just given a big dictionary of foreign language and you are tasked to write a Shakespeare level scripture. You definitely will be overwhelmed; you just don’t know what to do and where to start. Too little exposure to discovery will cause boredom. Now, write your name 100 times (Don’t! Just imagine the task would be enough). There are no new things to discover, just the same stroke again and again. Boring! So, good levels are levels that introduce new problems and corresponding solutions with good pacing.

Do note that fun doesn’t necessarily have locks and keys, just that locks and keys are a really good place to start for making a level. Fun at its core is discovery. This is why discovery and variation are emphasized. You need more variation to have more discovery, which is fun. There is always fun in variations of art and music. However, the fun in pure art and music in game is fleeting; visuals and audios are just super fast to be consumed and achieve complete discovery. We don’t want fleeting fun as it soon becomes boring. So, these are usually auxiliary, such as beautiful background, cool ambient noise, and NPC communication. It is good to have them, but at a requirement that the basis of level design is completed.

As a result, it would be wise to have a library of obstacles and capabilities so game developers can easily grasp on what is available when designing a level, while faciliate more creativity. Huanian Game Meta Designer aims to do just that. Moreover, this software also automate challenge sorting by sorting the challenges based on the available capabilities of given stage. Huanian Game Meta Designer is a gift to fellow game developer and designer to structure and channel the boundless creativity into your game project.