Level Design Blog 11

 Blog 11: 1/13

 After finishing my last level design project, inspired by Borderlands 3, I decided that there were some level design principles that could use some work, and over the holidays I began working on a personal project to expand on some of these skills.

Two of the main skills I thought could use some work were the scale of my levels and my ability to implement scripting. My previous level was very small, both in terms of physical size and the time it took to complete it, and I wanted more experience working on longer, more detailed level experiences. I also had a lot of difficulty integrating Blueprints into my level; although I was able to create functioning Blueprints from scratch, I had trouble working with the asset packs I integrated into the level, particularly around enemy spawning. 

For my new project, I decided to create a spinoff of a game idea I had some time ago, where the player plays as a space explorer who crashed on a deserted planet and has been surviving there for several years when a second spaceship crashes nearby. I began with a rough map of the surrounding area:

 

The player would begin near the top of a canyon, where a scripted event would trigger, showing the spaceship crashing into the canyon. The player would then have multiple options for routes they could take down through the canyon, discovering different information on each route before eventually arriving at the crash and coming to a different conclusion based on the route they took to get there.

I wanted to try to make the level as replayable as possible, with each route providing a slightly different story, meaning that playing through different routes would give the player a more and more complete picture of the crash each time. 

I modeled the spaceship, the trees, and the player's house in Maya before beginning to populate the level. I also added basic scripting to allow the player to interact with objects.

I ran into some difficulties creating the scripted event for the crash; although I successfully created and animated the crash itself, I wanted to add some small effects, like moving rocks as the spaceship flew down. In the future, I plan to add more of these effects and to begin adding more of the story to the three routes through the canyon.

I also began working on the first level of our capstone game, Punk Rock Exorcist. Working with the other level designer on my team, Hang, we created a LDD for the first portion of the game. There are two floors to the high school where the first level takes place, and we split up the level by floor. 

I blocked out the top floor of the school by using a combination of existing assets from an asset pack, Unreal's CubeGrid tool, and some basic assets modeled through Unreal's Modeling Mode. After several iterations of feedback, I ended up with a basic blockout, which leads from a classroom on the second floor through the auditorium control booth and then down to the first floor.

After blocking out this level, I was happy with the space I was able to create and the speed with which I was able to block the floor out. I learned a lot about CubeGrid in particular as I was working on this level; in the future, I would take a much different approach to using the tool, but for a first pass through the level I was happy with the results. 

Finally, I began work on my next level design project, based on The Long Dark: Wintermute. Much of The Long Dark is open world, but there are several more contained levels within Wintermute that I wanted to use as inspiration--in particular, the Carter Hydro Dam, which is a self-contained section of the map focused on exploration under a slight time constraint.

After looking through the extensive existing maps of The Long Dark, I decided to create a level with a similar flow to the dam, where the player would receive a task outside of a contained space and then move through that space to complete the task. I settled on creating a train station at the end of the abandoned train tracks that run across the entire island, where the main character would be coerced into entering the station to scare away a bear.

In The Long Dark, it's possible to fight a bear, but fighting it at close quarters results in a scripted event where the player loses the fight every time. I thought it would be interesting to pose the conflict with the bear as more of a stealth challenge, where the player would be rewarded for sneaking past the bear and moving through the building in a way that prioritized avoiding direct conflict.

In the end, I created two maps, one of the station and one of the surrounding area. I particularly look forward to getting more practice with scripting through working on this project.