Time for another of my early level design sketches. I thought it would be cool if Dare had to jump on some hippos to reach another platform. Plus, some sort of bird flying across the top of the screen just to make things a little trickier for the player when Dare is at the top of his jump arc.

HippoBack

And once again, I was pretty damn happy to see that my final artwork wasn’t a million miles away from my original vision. I replaced the hippos with crocodiles, but other than that things haven’t changed much. My sketch work is incredibly rough but at that stage of development it’s about working out ideas rather than spending time making something look good.

BasicGameplay02

Only once you’re confident that you’re ideas will work should you start investing time in the creation of proper artwork. I also did some very early prototyping – which I’ll talk about some other time – based on my rough sketches, which was invaluable in verifying my ideas.

Hopefully you guys like what you’re seeing.