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While making current iteration of The Yellow Boat Reimagined, I made a few map proposals. Even though they are not used, these were ultimately repurposed as a reference point for the experience and progression we wanted to have in the original The Yellow Boat.

There will be a symbol like this placed in every map designs which represents the major player constraint and serves multiple purposes.

First, being a tool for preventing players in making sharp turns of more than 90 degrees. I thought that this might prevent player dizziness or accidents because of the cords.

Second, it is also a tool for orientation as I would know where players are facing at the start, middle and end of the level. This really helped me quickly progress through the ideation process without rethinking much of where the player was and how the player was originally oriented.

Lastly, it serves as a tool for discouraging players from backtracking the levels since the levels tend to go forward and there will be no sense if players go back. It helped me look at it in the perspective of the players and what actions they might do while playing.

This was actually the first map I did to test out the features of AutoCAD. Furthermore, it was actually in this map that I learned how to make 3D shapes in AutoCAD and how I can manipulate the edges to form the desired shapes. Admittedly, it still looks messy but the idea was, players would climb rocks, enter the cave and ultimately reach the top area. This also set up my main standards in making levels which were:

1. No backtracking.
2. Always has an alternative path.
3. Well-paced progression from exposition to challenge.

When I made this map, I was thinking of how I can magnify the dangers in the game. So the idea here is that there will be a scripted event when the pulley cart breaks and the players need to keep themselves safe through the gushing river. They can do this by climbing up walls and climbing ashore.

This map comes right after the River-Pulley level. They will now be challenged into doing lateral climbing movements and flinging themselves over to safe areas. By far, I would say that this is the most intricate map I’ve thought of for a VR game. Now, looking at it in a fresh perspective, this would really pose quite a challenge in implementing since there will be scripted events, timed events and alternative paths that split and converge.

This map is actually an experiment on putting in colors to denote height references. I tried my best to be consistent and logical in doing these kinds of maps since my major was not architecture. I had to learn it out of sheer passion in the hopes that it would be useful in the future.

Here are some variations I did for the Cliff area. Both of them have the purpose of teaching and challenging the players how to climb.

This first one is actually quite ambitious as I designed it to have 3 paths with varying degrees of rewards for each. Additionally, there are two exit points that eventually converge on the next area.

While the second one streamlines the map to its raw parts. It still delivers the main idea of climbing; however, I focused on clarity and simplicity of the paths.

Here is the evolution of the main game map from the simplest to the most detailed parts.