— ROYA'S STUDIO —

The Level Plan

Floor 1

Warehouse combat area

Floor 2

Security Division combat area

Floor 3

Floor 3 player experience

Project Description

From the Source is a University-assigned mission design project heavily inspired by the legendary Half Life series, and a demonstration of my expertise in level design and the level production process. It was designed using a build provided to me by my tutors.

The Rift

'The Rift' annotated blockout

Creating the spike trap

In the middle of a rework, check back soon!

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The final product - watch the Gravebound trailer!

Concepting stage

The first week or so was all about team organisation and initial concepting. First, a Discord server was set up for us all to communicate in, organised with channels for each of the disciplines. Next, the discipline leads all set up their own respective Trello boards for task allocation and tracking, so I set up the design Trello. Click the images to enhance.

Our Discord featured an ideas forum, where any team members could make a post with what they think the project should be, and we could all share opinions and collaborate. Pretty immediately we all agreed on a dark fantasy theme as a direct contrast to Tunic's bright and colourful world. The first sketch I created for the world design was of the overworld, which I then became in charge of.

To add to the pressure of this project (which we were allocated 12 weeks to do), team leads also had to hold bi-weekly presentations in front of the 7 other teams to update on the previous week's progress, share problems and how we solved them, and lay out our intentions for the following weeks. This experience of public speaking to a large audience every 2 weeks was initially quite daunting, but became easier with time. Every week I was in charge of the design slides, as well as taking everyone else's slides and formatting them into something professional looking and cohesive in PowerPoint.

Pre-production

The pre-production stage began immediately after the first week's presentation. With our idea established, it was time to get to work. I created the Game Design Document, which would subsequently get updates throughout the duration of the project which I would share with the team.

I also began to lay out the game's narrative and worldbuilding, as this would influence the mechanics design and 3D art. I decided to split the game world into 2 sections - the overworld and the dungeons. The overworld would serve as the introduction to the game and house the NPCs and exploration aspect of the game, and the dungeons would feature the combat and levelling up aspect. Both would be seamlessly linked by the questing system and eventual boss fight.

I decided I wanted the world to have interactable NPCs to make the game into more of an RPG than Tunic, as I love the genre. These NPCs would not only give the player their quest objectives, but act as barriers and markers for progression.

After I designed the NPCs and my enemy designer had designed the mobs for the game, I had the important job of communicating this to the character outsource team and animation outsource team. They provided the teams with a sheet to fill out with all the details they needed to know in order to get started on modelling and animating our characters. I provided detailed descriptions and reference images.

Production

After extensive team talks and early problem solving, production was now in full swing. I'd like to start this section by showing you my Game Design Document, which I created and maintained throughout the whole 12 week development cycle. This document ended up being 44 pages long with 4293 words by the end of the project. It was incredibly comprehensive and provided much help to the artists and programmers of the team. Here are just a few of its pages:

I got to work on tweaking the completed overworld blockout my team had implemented, and began to focus on the atmosphere of the level. The first important part of atmosphere is the lighting. I lit all areas of the game as and when the blockouts came in. Here are some in-engine screenshots of my overworld and dungeon lighting work:

The lighting colours were chosen very specifically. The temperature of the light in the overworld helped the colours of the environment models pop out even more, and narratively signified a sense of both safety and mystery for the player, as the overworld is a dark and dangerous realm. Lighting was something I constantly iterated upon throughout production, as I received different feedback on it after every playtesting session. Sometimes it was too dark for players to see, so I had to find the perfect balance between the eerie ambiance I was going for & playability.

The second important part of the world's atmosphere was the rolling ground fog. The main area of the game is a forsaken village nestled deep within a forest. I thought fog would best fit the dark fantasy theming.

To do this, I used visual scripting to create a fog material, and then added that material to a plane object that would be placed above the ground. The end result became a staple of the world design and was praised by playtesters and tutors. Here's some code screenshots, a video of it in action and some beauty shots:

I also decided to add location name pop-ups to the screen during player exploration. The first time the player enters a new area, it shows up briefly before fading out. I liked this as it was reminiscent of other RPGs I have enjoyed in the past, and added some depth to the world.

After writing the details necessary for the designs of the villager NPCs in the Game Design Document, I took to engine to build the NPC dialogue system from scratch. I created a parent blueprint for the NPCs themselves, and a parent actor component for the dialogue trees. From these parent blueprints, I could create duplicate child blueprints and edit them to create each individual unique character.

The dialogue actor component housed all the functions necessary for a working dialogue system such as opening/closing conversation, progressing/removing dialogue and updating dialogue. Here are a couple of code examples:

As for the dialogue itself, I wrote it all up on a program called Twine. The program's interface was perfect for planning and visualising each conversation.

To make things clearer for the player, I created an interact prompt that triggered upon the player entering the NPC's capsule collider. This was added later, as during playtesting, it was reported that some players either didn't know the interaction controls or just didn't know they could talk to the characters at all, so this was made to remedy the issue.

The last thing I needed to create to give this dialogue system a purpose and tie it into player progression was the objectives system. Most of the system was actually coded within the base NPC blueprint, meaning I could apply it to all questgiver characters.

For 2 hours every week, we would hold a playtesting session. The playtesters included people from other teams, 1st year students, 3rd year students, tutors and masters students. This meant we had a wide range of expertise and many different perspectives on our game which was great. I made a simple feedback sheet with specific questions and spaces for detailed feedback on certain features. This feedback was invaluable to our team and made our project miles better.
Myself and the other leads were very hands on in this process; watching the playtesters go through the game and being available for any real time feedback or questions.

Throughout all of the solo work you've seen me do so far, I also had many responsibilities as the Design Lead managing the project. I was not only assigning myself tasks, but the rest of the design team. Like I mentioned in the concepting stage, I did this through the use of Trello and Discord. I would write up a detailed assignment, complete with prompts and visual help, then assign it to the correct board member on Trello. After I'd detailed all the tasks, I'd send out a message to the designers over on our Discord notifying them, and letting them know I was available to answer any questions and help them out. I did this at the beginning of every week.

Here's a small gallery of what my final level design contributions looked like:

Post production

We were informed by our tutors that from week 10, no more content was to be added to our projects, and the final 2 weeks were for polishing our games and creating our vertical slice video trailer. While the programming/development members of the team were focusing on technical polish, I took it upon myself as Design Lead to design cool cinematics and put the video together.

All cinematics seen in the final trailer were captured in-engine using Sequencer and exported into my video editor of choice, Davinci Resolve 17. These example shots below were used in the final cut:

My UI designer provided me with our team logo and game logo to be used, and multiple members of the team provided me with gameplay clips I had requested to show off all the features of our game. I found music from a Dark Souls 3 fan project by composer Alex Roe - it really fit with the theming of our project and gave me a good rhythm to edit the clips to.

To finish, I'd like to share an excerpt of the reflective essay I wrote, required by the University for the project's final hand-in.

"In conclusion, the most important thing I took away from the Journeyman experience was leadership skills and how to work in a large dev team. This was my first time working closely with other disciplines and my first time managing so many people. I made mistakes along the way, but ultimately, we developed a solid final product, and I learned more about what makes a reliable leader. In terms of personal contributions, I contributed more than I expected, as I took a big creative interest in what we were making, and it was something I was excited to work on. I really enjoyed overseeing and reviewing people’s work as I was able to guide the project into something cohesive and to a specific vision. This module was also an interesting insight into industry standards and what would be expected of me if I were to make it into a real game studio. Something I’d like to briefly mention is that I was the only woman on the team, and my positive time with my teammates has given me a lot of confidence as a woman in a leadership role within a male dominated industry. Overall, I believe Journeyman has strengthened me as a game designer and I look forward to putting these lessons into practice in third year and beyond."

Designing the gameplay

Player sprite animation

Creating the backdrop

User interface

Industry showcase

Narrative design

Level and gameplay design

Cinematic design

The making of

Beauty Shots

Front end

HUD