Level Design Blog 7

Blog 7: 10/23-10/29

This week, I continued work on our latest RPP project. The game takes place in a suburban house, which a lizard has to run around while solving puzzles. Once we had settled on the narrative and the locations of each cutscene, which would tell the lizard's story in between puzzles, I spent time planning out the route the lizard would take and the locations of each puzzle.

Once I had created a rough outline of the house in Modeling Mode, I exported all of the walls from Unreal as an FBX and opened them in Maya. I created a cleaner model of the walls in Maya and brought them back into Unreal before beginning to populate the house.

Part of the story of our level involves a cat knocking over a variety of objects in the house after accidentally removing the lizard's tail. I started by adding upright furniture in each room, and then I went through and began adding knocked-over furniture and a variety of clutter.

Once the house was mostly populated, I started working on puzzles. I wanted the puzzles to fit into the rooms they took place in, so I tried to add puzzles that would fit with the existing surroundings I had created.

The puzzles rely on the lizard's ability to pick up and move blocks around. By adding Blueprint scripts to other objects in the room, I was able to add puzzles that interacted with the clutter in the room, like a springboard script attached to the bed and a plug in the bathroom that would turn on and off an electrocuted puddle of water.

I enjoyed working more with Blueprints and trying to create functioning puzzles. Taking inspiration from some of the Blueprints we created in class, I started working on a plug that would deactivate a sparking trap when it was unplugged from the wall.

I also added some simple physics to actors in the game so that the lizard could push items around inside the level.

Overall, this has been a very interesting project to work on. I'm excited for the rest of the story to be integrated into the level and to see how the final result looks.

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