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Level Design Blog 4

 Blog 4: 9/12-9/24


This week, I was very busy finishing our RPP project and working on my first game pitch. I spent a long time learning basic modeling to help with our RPP project, and I got some practice creating and texturing props for our level. The most difficult part was unwrapping the UVs, which I had some difficulty with but eventually figured out. The best prop I created for our level was this shovel.


In the future, I would like to work more with modeling in Maya; I would like to be able to create my own simple props and objects, especially to use as modular assets in blockouts. 

I also finished adding materials and props to our level and worked with Unity's landscape tools. It was interesting to see the differences between landscape modeling in Unity and Unreal; although I think I like Unreal's landscape mode more, I was able to create a landscape I was fairly happy with.



I also worked on some basic level design for my game pitch. The game I wanted to create was very stylized, with mechanics focused on speed, and I thought it would be an interesting challenge to come up with a level concept to fit in with the feel of the game.

The game is a co-op game about trying to escape from the top floor of a tall office building while the other workers in the building are slowly being turned into aggressive zombie-like creatures. The style I chose for the game is very heavily stylized, with the only usable colors being jet black, white, and red, so I wanted to find a style for the level design that would still come across as readable.

I eventually settled on an environment focusing on vertical elements and overlapping diagonal elements, which would help the player's depth perception in such a highly-stylized environment. The flow of the game moves downward through a series of floors of the building, each with a near-solid bottom floor and a series of narrow balconies and catwalks above it. Since lighting also plays a part in the game's mechanics, with lit areas functioning as safe rest spots for the player, I focused these lit spots on more exposed areas of the bottom floor, so that the safety of the light would come at the cost of becoming very visible to everybody else on the floor.


This was an interesting challenge to design a level for, and although I stuck with a very rough blockmesh, I was fairly happy with how the concept came out. It would be interesting to see how increasing the stylization and detail level would change the look of the level, especially given how dark the level turned out without adding any white highlights. In the future, I would lean into the lighting design more, since I think it makes a big difference in such an overall dark level.

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