Blockout Peer Feedback

Here I asked for some peer feedback on my blockout.

Original Questions

My map is a dungeon crawl style map with set piece rooms where encounters or other things like puzzles can occur. I know it's quite difficult to imagine without any enemies or things actually occurring, but please try to answer the following questions!

1. Map size - How do you feel about the general size of the map after running through it? Use the floating text to help imagine!

2. Separate to the general map size, what do you feel about the scale with regards to the envinronment itself, i.e. corridors, ceiling height, encounter room sizes, main boss arena, etc?

3. What do you think of the flow of the map? I have a couple of dead ends and alternative paths which have the player taking different routes, what should I do with these areas? additional rewards? secrets?

Peer reply 1

1.A. For your dungeon crawl game you have done a great job making use of the whole map. There are a lot of enemy waves in the map meaning you will always have something to do.

2.A. The overall scale of the map is ok, but it may need a slight adjustment. The corridor walls need to be a bit smaller in the height axis and the corridor floor needs its width adjusted. It is not too much of a big problem however.

3.A. First impressions of the flow of the map is that you can get easily lost. I could not even find the centre of the map on my first run. If you are intending on making the player go to dead ends then what you can do is add in some helpful pointers on the navigation of the map. If possible you could create a map of the dungeon and set it as a HUD. When a player hits a dead end a section of the map will be reveled.

Peer reply 2

1 - The map size seems relatively good. This might need tweaking but that would be dependent on how long the dungeon takes to go through once you actually can test with AI. But at a glance it's good.

2 - Environment:

Ceiling height is pretty much spot on. If you wanted to drop in some ceiling spike traps in it feels like the roof height wouldn't need much altering either.
Corridors are reasonably spaced out and sized especially based on the current speed of the character (no need for toggle etc, specially when you combine this with AI to fight)
Room sizes seem - same as the above basically for now.
Didn't find the main boss room.

3 - Some of your offset rooms could contain small treasure chests, this would very much suit a dungeon crawler that's paced well. In order to suggest these areas rather than having everything looking the same this might come through later via some sort of treasure cove / aladdins cave vibe i.e. gold / silver sparkling through the wall textures to suggest if the user pays attention that this route may be more rewarding (it can also of course be a false positive and kill the player).

My response

In general it seems that people are happy with the size and scale of the map, but it appears that there needs to be some work done on guiding the player as both appeared to get lost while playing.

I'll add this issue to the list of improvements to do.