Mummy's Tale Level Design Part 2: The Ground Ruins

Lighting, time of day and visuals are not truly indicative of the final product, and are intended as placeholders

After the opening scene is done, the sound of a tumbling stone is heard, as Cleo looks behind her. It’s a cat, although something is strange about it. It’s fur is pure white and unnaturally smooth, it has four gold braces on each of it’s paws, and there’s a gold mark on it’s face, encompassing it’s eyes and nose. The cat points with it’s tail the way forward before running off. Cleo figures that it’s the best shot she has, and that it would be no more dangerous than sticking around.

Gameplay truly starts here. You’ll walk forward past the ruinous area where one of the scorpion attacks could have happened, and there’s fallen pillar in front of you. Right in the background near it, is a tablet. It depicts a figure leaping over a city, and below the image, is a symbol, and it’s the jump button. This is how you learn to jump over objects, as the player does with the pillar. Moving a bit further, you’ll find your first enemy. A smaller scorpion, albeit your size, it’s body ebony black. The player can attack the scorpion with the same command as before. It takes about three hits before it shatters into pieces. Cleo even mutters to herself, “It shattered like rock… Why?” in a text popup above her.

The player moves on, fighting two more scorpions. Upon reaching the third, a fourth scorpion on a fallen pillar platform will come into view. The two are close enough that the player can use the counter/grapple technique, supported by a tutorial tablet right between the two. When you beat it, the player will jump onto the pillar, and then onto a broken pillar within jump high of the fallen one.

At this point, the camera will zoom out to reveal the cat climbing up an aqueduct on high, before moving on again. However, it’s too high to jump up to, sans a chipped outcrop from the damage. Cleo looks at it, and remarks to herself through pop up. “If I could pull that monster, then maybe…” The outcrop glows as the player is able to use the grapple ability, where they can latch onto points, and pull themselves up. Doing this action brings the player to the Aqueduct section.

Commentary

The first appearance of the cat here is something I used to give more of a motivation to both the character and the player. He’s going to turn out to be the supporting protagonist, and in earlier drafts of the story, he had a fairly sizeable dialogue bit here, but for the context of the game, it’s been heavily condensed, as well as being moved to later in the stage, near the very end. For now, he points Cleo and the player forward, with her being in a situation where she has no idea what to do, and is given some kind of direction, with little other choice.

I want the player to learn how to jump before any other action in gameplay, since, being a platformer, it’s a core part of the game. The way I want to convey it though, it  through the tablet in the background. I wanted a natural way to explain the controls to the player. In the opening, it was necessary to have the buttons due to the scripted nature of the segment, but in the gameplay itself, I thought it would be too intrusive. The tablet is my way to fix that. The main palette of the level is light brown, black and white, and these tablets have the figures on them coloured bright silver, so they stick out against the colours. I want the images on the tablet to be super stylised depiction of great deeds from legend, for a bit of humour that they’re being used to teach the player to do fairly mundane things.

The dynamic between defeating enemies via bandage whips and throwing them is that whipping enemies takes more hits, and puts you in more danger of taking a hit. However, throwing them requires you to wait till they wind up their attacks, and then attacking, allowing you to throw them for a one hit kill. However, it's a bit of a random chance because it depends on enemies using a certain attack, and is risky in it’s own way since you do risk failing it. It can take longer and result in more lost health. So these segments where it’s set up to make the most out of the concept can just as well be solved with normal attacks, if the player isn’t good enough at them. Furthermore, the scorpion on the rock is placed so the player can go for a throw kill, while also not being overwhelmed.

The two dialogue bits from Cleo are something I would ideally have as short quotes above her. Stopping the game to have her say the lines would break game flow. A text box in the U.I itself would possibly be too intrusive. So these short lines popping up over her head would be a good way to convey her thoughts quickly without stopping the game.

Finally, the idea of grappling up to the aqueducts has this environmental theme up rising up. The stage takes the player higher up into the valley so they can get a better look at their surroundings, when they started the game at the bottom, so to speak.