Leveler mini-game & Leveler Arena

This is an idea I had late last night, and in a forging frenzy I have already completed the first draft of the game type and map. Looking for playtesters this week - this is almost assured to be a good time, with the right amount of people.

The premise of Leveler is deceptively simple. The map is divided into long but narrow stages separated by one-way shields. Once you pass through a shield to the next level, you cannot easily return to the level you left. Weapons are all of the heavy-hitting variety but they do no damage. Instead, the object of the game is to push the other team's players into the deadly fourth level, The Incinerator Room. Forcing players into this last level is the only way to score, as the room will kill them - one way or another - doing the job that your weapons and melee attacks will not.

Leveler is meant to be played with teams of 4-6 players each for fast, frantic, loud play. The game type has loadouts built to make the game more hectic and keep the action flowing, so you can Evade or Sprint, but not use Armor Lock or Camo or anything else that might slow things down. It also has a custom power-up that gives a slight speed boost and huge jumping boost, which is useful in the first level in particular.

The arena also has some special features. There's a teleporter on levels 2 and 3 that lead back to 1 and 2, respectively - but they are precariously perched so as to make them difficult to access (thanks to Angery Midget for this suggestion!). There are Chuckholes on the ceiling and walls that let you throw or fire grenades into the next level if you want to try to affect the players there without risking your superior position. There are weapons you might choose to try out (though the default kit of concussion rifle and grenade launcher is quite effective), and one armor ability pickup at the 3rd level that might save your butt. And there are vehicle cannons and grav lifts in key positions to 1. keep players from just camping the outside walls, and 2. give you strategic ways to force the enemy from level to level other than your weapons.

Couple screenshots -

The Incinerator Room


Side view of some of the levels, plus the slippery walkway to the teleporter

 

Yeah sorry, it's a bit hard to explain. Here's a crappy MS Paint overhead diagram:



Everyone spawns in the small circles at the top (level 1). Red lines are one way shields - you can go downward through them, but not back up. The only way back is to take a teleporter - S1 to R1, or S2 to R2. Green ovals are grav lifts or man cannons pointing toward the shield, so most of the time if a player walks into one, he ends up down a level.

The goal is to push the enemy players into the Incinerator Room - level 4. The more shields or levels you push them through, obviously the closer they are. You just have to keep them from teleporting back a level. Usually this would mean someone on your team going through the levels with them, but there are also holes in the ceiling and walls (the wall holes are depicted above as purple Vs) that wrap around the shield and allow you to bounce grenades through without leaving the level you are on.

Weapons do no damage, but they are all capable of physically moving the other players - like the concussion rifle, fuel rod gun, grenades, grav hammer, etc. So you are trying to bounce other players into a grav lift or through the next one way shield. Then you might follow them through, or you might have a teammate already on the next level to keep pushing them; or you might throw or shoot grenades through the holes from your current level, into their level (though that is probably not going to be too effective by itself - depending on test results I may work on this aspect of the game. One possibility would be to raise the shields a bit so that you can throw grenades or shoot underneath them).

 

Why? I like the possibility of going back a level - I just want it to be difficult. In this case you have to walk up a fairly narrow walkway (made of columns), which of course you can be easily knocked off of. I think it adds a wrinkle to gameplay that should be interesting. Most of the time people won't be able to pull it off in the heat of battle, but occasionally they will. Of course if the other team is watching the receiver node, it would be fairly easy to blast them right back to the level they came from.

edit - One other possibility that I just thought of. In the first level there are triangular platforms you can only get on top of with a custom power-up that gives you higher jumping skills. I could possibly make the teleporters inaccessible except by jumping, and put a power-up at each level. That way if you were lucky enough to be there when it spawned, you could get out; otherwise you'd be stuck. Might be interesting.

That's a pretty loaded word, "dramatically." The forging is clean already (and that wasn't easy considering the somewhat odd shape of the arena, and the fact that the ceiling changes heights from level to level). It remains to be seen how it will play with teams, but I've tested it 1 vs. 1 and it was fairly intuitive and flowed properly. The only issue is that with just two players, it's hard to knock somebody through, and you basically have to follow them through to push them to the next level. As a team game I think this is going to be very entertaining.

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Edited by merge:

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UPDATE - I decided to run with a couple of ideas from this morning and I think this is almost ready to go now. First of all, the teleporters still exist but there's no longer a physical ramp (narrow or otherwise) leading to them. Now there is a custom power-up that spawns in all three levels, at intervals of 30 seconds (level 1), 45 seconds (level 2), and 60 seconds (level 3). If you get that, you can jump much higher for a short period, which lets you get to the teleporters to move up a level or two. The only other way to access them would be really lucky combinations of jumping and explosions. The power-up also lets you get to some high ground in the first level which could be very strategic in blasting the other team while not being in much danger yourself (until they knock you down, of course). I may increase those spawn intervals a little bit - if the game plays as frantically as I am hoping, the power-ups may need to pop up more often to be very useful.

I also raised the shields about a foot off the floor. This lets you much more easily affect players on the next level without leaving your own - especially by throwing or shooting grenades through the gaps. This rendered my beautifully forged (sniff) chuck-holes in the ceiling kind of redundant, so I scrapped some of them - however I did keep the ones in the walls, and the ones in the ceiling between levels 2 and 3, so people can mix it up if they want.

The nice part of both changes is that everything is streamlined and simplified. I think it will take players just a minute or two to get a handle on the game and figure out the entire arena structure - then they can focus on the nuances of blasting each other repeatedly.