Level Design Blog 2

Blog 2: 9/3-9/10

This week, I started work in Unreal Engine on a second iteration of the cave-inspired level I worked on last week. I liked the concept of my previous level, with platforms a player could travel across and inset areas under the platforms, but I wanted to make it feel more like a cave and add more variety for the player.

At the end of the series of platforms, the player reaches a large pillar with a chamber in the back, hidden from view at the start of the series.

I haven't finished blocking this level out yet, and as I work further on it I would like to focus further on the lighting, and possibly begin to replace some of the blocked-out areas with megascans.

I also began work on designing a level for my second RPP group. Our game is an asymmetrical two-player game, where one player is growing plants in a garden and passing them through a window to the second player, who is inside a house brewing potions. The potions are then passed back through the window to the gardener, who delivers them to the creature who ordered them.

I wanted to make sure that the two sides of the game felt balanced, especially in terms of the time it took to complete tasks. I blocked out several different iterations of the basic floorplan of the level in Maya, and then transferred them to Unity to run through.

Once I was happy with the general shape and size of the level, I brought it back into Maya and added more details, including the plots of land and seed boxes that the gardener would use and a variety of locations for the potioneer's supplies to spawn within the house.

Once I had models for most of the basic pieces of the level, including furniture and simple shapes to represent hedges and trees, I moved back into Unity to test and refine the level. I used a stopwatch to time myself running through each side of the level and modified the layouts until they took roughly the same amount of time to run.

After meeting with my team and going over our work, we decided to add an additional objective for the potioneer, so I added in an additional room for the potioneer to collect firewood. I also removed one wall of the garden and replaced it with a larger pond area to act as a natural barrier, at the suggestion of one of my teammates.

In future levels, I would like to do some more sketches or 2D mockups before jumping into whiteboxing, so I have a clearer idea of the layout and don't have to spend as much time refining the whitebox. I was very happy with how the two areas of the level turned out, though. As the project continues, I will be moving prefabs created by our team's artist into the level to replace the whiteboxed elements, and I will be working in Maya to create basic assets for the garden.

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Level Design Blog 1

Blog 1: 8/20 - 9/3 In class, I worked on completing the randomly-selected blockouts. I worked mostly with the included modeling mode tools, although I also spent some time trying out the BSP brushes on the cruise ship. Outside of class, I worked more with modeling mode and landscape mode and practiced lighting my scenes. One of the first blockouts I tried was of a playground. When I was a kid, my neighbors and sister and I would visit the playground near our house all the time, so after my mom told us it had been completely bulldozed a few days after the semester started, I decided to immortalize it in Unreal. I used photos I had taken, along with Google Earth satellite images, to try to reconstruct the playground as a basic whitebox level: I found that I struggled with more complicated shapes like the slides, so I used placeholders like spiral staircases for them, and I skipped the railings around the playground entirely. Once I was done, I used Merge Actors to turn the playgroun...

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