Nerve Damage is a noise FPS game by Dennis Carr.
Role: Level Design for approximately 50 levels
A game where parsing visual information is a big part of the challenge, Nerve Damage pushes players into a tenuous liminal space between information overload and flow-state.
Nerve Damage is a one-planar game; the player can't look up or down. Instead, the y-axis of the mouse modulates the weapon that the player is using.
Level designs are thus constrained to 2 dimensions, similar to the original Doom or Wolfenstein. A special ability allows the player to “fall through” the level, introducing limited vertical traversal, and presenting the player with top-down plan view for a few precious moments. Later levels begin to require player mastery of this special mode, cordoning off sections of the map and incentivizing risk taking through enemy and power-up positioning.
Levels are short - each taking between 10 and 60 seconds, depending on player experience levels. Frequent playtesting has been essential in scaling level difficulty and size to hit that goal. Using a combination of Unity and Doombuilder, we were able to quickly create, test, and iterate upon maps.
Part of the enjoyment of designing levels for Nerve Damage is coming up with themed groups (cathedrals, islands, the human body, etc) and creating a series of 5-10 levels based on that theme. This also formed the basis of the game’s branching meta-stucture.
