chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog

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Honours Project - Mechanic Breakdown

                                        Etigo is a Level Design project for me. I wanted to focus on what goes into making an exciting and engaging level that promotes replay and intrigues the player into learning what they could do better. To do this I first needed to make a series of mechanics to fit the theme of the game. I knew this would take time, so I ensured to allocate the first few months of the project to this. I was also very mindful that the mechanics were not my main aim for this game, so I set myself a date to call them finished and not work on them any further until the level was complete and it was time to polish everything. I will go over all the different mechanics I made in this part of the journal; however, I will keep it brief as my focus was the level design not the technical aspect of the project.

 Movement

 he movement mechanics were vital to get working early in the project. This was because without the movement being finished it would be impossible to start working on other aspects such as AI (artificial intelligence) and the gunplay. To make the movement mechanics I basically just tweaked the run speed until it felt right, then did the same with the jump height and air control to allow strafing. I also coded a Grapple Hook as the primary movement ability. It took a lot of fiddling with to get it to feel right but I am very happy with the result.

 Guns and Shooting

As this level was intended to be the first or second level in Etigo, I did not want to have too many different guns. I thought a good starting set up would be a Shotgun for close range combat, and an AK47 for medium to long range combat. This worked very well, and I ensured to programme the weapon system to make it easy to add to in the future. The guns were made in blueprint using a very modular technique that I created myself. Every aspect of the guns is broken down into their own functions and it would be a case of copying a set of those functions and changing some variables if I was to add another gun. This would be done in-between levels in a full version of Etigo.

The shooting is done in a very similar way and is very intuitive to use when playing the game. There are crosshairs the bullets go towards them. There is some recoil to control with the AK47 which raises the skill ceiling so that players can practice with the gun and learn how to control it to hit their shots more consistently. The player must be aware of how much ammo they have in their magazine also, however there are no reserves so they can shoot as much as they wish. This was a design decision I made early on because I do not find running out of bullets very fun, so I didn’t want that in my game.

Artificial Intelligence

For the AI in Etigo I took a lot of inspiration from Dusk as mentioned above. I wanted them to be fast and aggressive and not hold back against the player. They are coded quite simply so when the melee enemies see the player, they run and attack. The ranged enemies are the same in that when they see the player, they will cast a fireball until the player gets behind cover and breaks line of sight. The ranged enemy will then look at where the player is hiding until they regain line of sight when they will start to cast fireballs once again. These fireballs are obvious and easy to see and have been designed for the player to dodge them while shooting at the enemy in question.

I added 3 different melee enemies to add some variety to the level. These are a large slow enemy, a quick medium sized enemy and a very hard to see “invisible” enemy that shimmers. This invisible enemy is very fast but has very little health.

There is also a boss fight at the end of the level which consists of a different enemy model to everything else. This boss is huge and slow moving. It slams the ground with one hand and then the other in a consistent rhythm. If the player learns this pattern and the rhythm of the hits they can dodge and kill the boss with ease. The boss was designed as a tutorial to give players a feel for how the boss fights will play in the future if it was a full game.

Pickups and Generators

To make a “Retro FPS” game, pickups are a vital part of getting the player to move smoothly throughout the level. They are also used to solve puzzles and complete tasks in the levels. The main way I carried this out was leading the player to points of interest using Health Kits. These will restore 50% of the players total health points and they are vital to surviving in Etigo. If the player continues to work towards the next Health Kit they will eventually arrive where they need to be.

The next pickup I created was a grenade ammo refill. These give the player 2 extra grenades to use to clear large groups of enemies. These pickups are very simple and are placed carefully throughout the level to ensure the player doesn’t have too many of them. Too many of these pickups makes the game too easy, this was found and balanced thanks to playtesting sessions.

The last resource the player can collect is their Power. Power is part of the suit the main character wears that allows them to carry out various actions. This Power can be filled up at the big green generators throughout the level. It takes a few seconds and the player must be standing still to syphon from the generators. This leaves them vulnerable to attack so syphoning should be a strategic decision made when the time is right.

User Interface

I loved the way that Half Life 2 did their UI, so I designed mine to be very similar. It works with animations that get called depending on which gun the player selects. I also have a Power Bar that shows how much Power the player has. The power bar is colour coordinated to match the generators that the player can syphon from to fill the bar up. I have health bar and Grapple Cooldown bar.

Below is the Half Life 2 UI and it is laid out in a very similar way to mine. When the player selects a weapon in the game it plays an animation to show which weapon was selected from the right-hand side of the screen.

Below this you can see the UI in Etigo. It works in a very similar way and simply shows the information needed to the player.

Discarded Mechanics

I had a lot of different mechanics that I created for the project that ended up not being used in the final build. This was due to them feeling out of place or slowing the pace of the game in a way that I did not like. These mechanics were toggled by pressing the F key after selecting one from the Ability Menu. I decided to have only the Grapple Hook permanently bound to the F key and discard the other mechanics. The discarded mechanics were:

 Slow Motion: This did not feel like it helped the player enough. All it did was slow the game down in a way that was not fun.

 Freeze all Enemies: This had a similar effect to the Slow-Motion mechanic. It also made the game far too easy.

 Flashlight: This worked perfectly, and I would have kept it in if the player had any use for it. It was originally created for a platforming sequence that I later removed from the game. I will talk about this sequence in the Level Process section of this document but without, there was no use for the Flashlight. The plan for the Flashlight would be to pick it up at a later point in the game when the need arises.

 Full Heal: This was very overpowered and made the game incredibly easy. It also stopped the player needing to follow the Health Kits used to guide them through the level.

 Double Jump: This mechanic made some of the carefully calculated jumps in the level not work as intended. I added the Double Jump too late in the project to make it work so I took it out.

 Sprint: I did not like having to toggle the sprint, and this was not a feature in the games I used for research. Instead of having a toggleable print ability, I set the player to be permanently running at sprint speed. This really made Etigo feel like the games from the period I was aiming for.

 Pick up objects: This was my favourite of the discarded mechanics. It did allow the player to move rocks and other objects around to create their own structures. This is something I would absolutely add into Etigo as a full game.

 Ability Menu: To select which ability the player would use; I created a menu they could enter by pressing Tab. This was obviously discarded when I decided to prune the above mechanics.

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Level Design - References

All sounds used in the level were downloaded from FreeSound:

https://freesound.org/

I also used an asset pack from the UE4 Marketplace for the gun models:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/low-poly-weapons-armory

Everything else in the level was made by myself either in Maya or using the Geometry tool in UE4.

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Level Design - Reflective Blog

One thing that could have gone drastically better was my ‘Wallhack’ mechanic. The idea for this mechanic was to create a usable ability that would allow you to see the enemies though walls for a set amount of time. I spent a full day getting the custom rendering working to render the enemies through the walls which was fine and worked perfectly. The issue came when trying to activate the ability after the game had started. The issue was that the ability worked if turned on when the level was loaded, but if turned on any time after that it would only render a few enemies and very buggily at that. Here is a short video of the issue:

This issue caused me to lose a few days and they ended up being totally wasted days because I ended up dropping the idea as there was not enough time to continue adding mechanics like this.

The next thing I wish I did better would be the blueprint for the weapon system. The system works perfectly fine as is, but it is not optimal by a long shot. As discussed in the video handed in with the work, I did not originally have any plans to have more than 1 gun in the game. This meant I just coded the shooting and reloading as single sets of blueprint inside the PlayerCharacter. The whole system could be remade and allow for much more control if I had put each gun into separate blueprints and have them called via states on the PlayerCharacter. This would allow for quick tweaking of variables in the individual blueprints for each gun without risking of breaking the other ones. 

Breaking the game up into actual gameplay states would have helped immensely with AI programming also. I think overall a lot more time could have gone into my AI and the experience as a whole would have benefited from this. As they are right now, they see the player they chase the player. I wanted to code in more complex systems and states such as moving to last known location and smarter roaming than what is currently in there. 

I think the thing that could have improved everything overall would have been better time allocation and management. I spent a lot of time on the actual layout of the level and I am very happy with how that turned out, but I think the overall experience of playing the level could have been improved if I spent more time on the other parts that ended up being more time consuming than I had originally planned.

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Level Design - Reflective Blog

Overall I am very happy with the way my level turned out. I set out to create an FPS level reminiscent of old school titles like Doom and Quake. I think in many ways I achieved this, not only mechanically but in terms of map layout and level design also.

The first thing I think went well was the use of platforming in the outside area of the map. This is something that was very prevalent in the titles mentioned above and a big part of what I wanted to achieve with the level made for this assignment. The outdoor courtyard area of the level is where I put all of the platforming. Some of it very easy, some not so much. When the player first enters the area they can see a rifle on top of the tree in the center of the area. This is the affordance I used to spark an interest in the player to try to reach up there to collect the gun. It is also a big aid when it comes to of the completion of the level. Having a long range gun helps immensely with dealing with the Shooter enemies dotted around the courtyard and rooms that make up the level.

To reach this rifle, there are a few different routes the player can take. The player must first get on top of the scaffolding on the right hand side of the courtyard. To do this they have 2 options. If they entered the courtyard via the balcony then they can jump from up there onto the large pile of boxes and then onto the scaffolding. 

The other way up there is accessible from the ground level of the courtyard. The player has to cross to the opposite side of the area and up onto the stack of boxes next to the blue shipping containers then up onto the scaffolding. They can then use the large pile of boxes to climb onto the top level of the scaffolding.

The next part of the platforming was probably one of my favorite design decisions made during this project. The first time the player tries to jump from the scaffolding to the container above the tree, they will fail. This is because to make this jump you have to jump from on top of one of the metal poles holding the scaffolding up. This is a technique used a lot in the older FPS games mentioned above. I really like this type of level design because it forces the player to think. They think maybe they are missing something, or maybe they have to try the jump a different way. It also causes a moment of panic as they fall back down to the ground where there are probably going to be several enemies waiting for them.

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DD2000 - Proposal

As the end goal for my career in games is to be a level designer, my path there might be slightly different to what I originally thought. The main issue that I have come to realize is putting together a portfolio that shows off my work but in an interesting fashion. Showing off Level Design opens a lot of different options when it comes to portfolio pieces. This is something I will have to look into over the course of the term to see what other level designers did to show their work off to potential employers.

Level design is in a bit of a mid point between technical design and art. I will definitely have to include bits of both of those aspects in my portfolio to stand out above other level designers that might not have the same varied skillset.

To gather this information a good place to start seems to be on twitter. I can use twitter to find level designers at various companies and then try to find their own portfolios. It would also be very helpful to speak with people directly asking for advice. Obviously this can’t be guaranteed as everyone will be very busy but it can’t hurt to shoot off a few emails. If i do get any replies, this will help me greatly in gathering some information on the subject.

The next thing that would be good to do is look at companies where I would like to work and see if they have any job listings for Level Design. If I can find a few of these to look through it will give me some very clear skills that I need to work on developing to start applying for jobs at those companies or similar. Every studio has a careers page that can be looked through. As the main companies I would love to work for are Valve and Blizzard, I would start there. For smaller Indie Studios I could even send a few emails inquiring about applications for Level Design roles and what skills I would need to stand out above the other applicants. It would also be very helpful to see this broken down as I can go away and really hone in those skills before applying for jobs next year.

Another potential job path for level design (for Valve mainly) is through the modding community. A lot of the current Counter Strike maps were made by modders years ago and the playerbase enjoyed them so much that the creators were hired to maintain the maps and make new ones for the game. This is also how the Counter Strike franchise came about in the first place, with a couple of guys modding Half Life then getting hired by Valve after it getting hugely popular. All of these modders are very active on social media and would be useful to get in touch with. They also keep blogs and YouTube channels where they update the playerbase on what they are doing and how things are coming along. This would be a great place to go to look into starting to understand the workflow of people in this role.

[chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog]

DD2000 - Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer

Portfolio Pet Peeves:

Bad Presentation

Unfinished / irrelevant work

Lack of explanation / annotation

Difficulty accessing content

Good work is the most important thing over experience. The portfolio is the most important part of getting the job. Ensure everything is clean and easy to read. 

Don’t focus on specific software / tools.

Quality over quantity

Keep the quality high all the way to end of the portfolio. Don’t put anything weak in there.

Test the portfolio on multiple mediums. 

Have a dedicated portfolio / website. Not a blog or social media feed.

Attention to detail in everything, including spelling and layout.

Existing IP’s are OK but original content is needed.

Specialization is very strong. Be the best at what you do. Branch out within that overall specialization after. Being too broad is confusing for the studio, they want to see you are good at what you want to do.

While looking for a job, you have a job. Your job is to replace all student work with better work. Keep constantly updating and iterating.

They want to see passion for the work you put together.

Don’t let rejection stop you. Keep applying, even to the places that have rejected you previously (NOT TOO SOON).

Fresh portfolio is a fresh chance to apply for studios.

Get other people to give feedback on your work constantly. You can’t truly judge your own work.

Don’t rely on one place, cast a wide net to lots of studios.

Everything about you on the internet will be read and checked. Studio’s won’t hire you if you are a dick. The industry is small and word travels fast, so don’t be a dick.

Look at yourself as a brand. Be professional.

Don’t give up on tests that you’ve been given, sometimes they are designed to be too hard and to test your troubleshooting / corner cutting skills.

Lacking internet presence is fine, as long as the portfolio is good not having a huge twitter following doesn’t matter.

Don’t spend too much time tailoring portfolios for different studios. It is a lot of work to do and you will burn out. Focus the one thing you love.

Cover letter is good!

Credit other work if any is used.

Pay attention to the job description.

Flythrough of level design is good. Playable level is the best way to show good design. If the studio can’t try it, they can’t tell if it is good enough.

Philosophy of design is very important to be aware of also. Studios want to know how you think.

Whiteboxes are OK in a Level Design portfolio. Story telling and tactical space is important to be mindful of.

[chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog]

DD2000 - Indie Studio Startup Research

First thing that needs to happen would be the assembly of a team to actually build the game. This can be done in a variety of ways, all revolving around networking. You can find people online on social medias or job websites. You can also reach out to people specifically if their work appeals to your project. Artists can be found on places such as ArtStation and SketchFab. You can also advertise the job opening on websites, game specific or otherwise.

The set up of the Studio as a business is the next step. This has various legal paths that must be taken in order to carry out. This includes registering the name and getting Tax ID sorted out. There are a lot of other legalities to be mindful of including Trademarks and Employee contracts.

There are a multitude of ways to get your game noticed. A great platform for this recently has been Twitch. If you look at the success of games like Playerunknown’s BattleGrounds, you will see that most of the playerbase is connected to Twitch in some way. Everyone on PUBG knows people like Shroud or DrDisrespect. DrDisrespect recently broke a Twitch record for most viewers for a single streamer with 400 thousand constant viewers. This alone obviously contributed to the 26 million sales of the game. Getting a large streamer or YouTube personality to play your game can boost sales and get the ball rolling for your studio. Other ways to get the game noticed would be to attend events such as EGX with a stand where people can try the game out and speak to the developers directly.

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DD2000 - Project Research - Game Pitch

Third Person, Multiplayer, Duel (1v1), Arena

Similar to Gunz; The Duel, WoW’s Duel System

Destructible environment (pillars, cover etc)

Abilities with cooldowns

Different melee weapons to choose from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY6-iXknQ3w

Arena based map with lots of props to move around. Heavy use of Z axis with characters using their movement mechanics to traverse the arenas. These consist of double jumps, dashes and more intricate ways of cancelling animations to reset jumps (like in Gunz)

All the objects in the arena will be destructible, so if your opponent has reached some high ground or is playing around a box, you can just destroy it. This can be done with multiple weapon swings (more for stronger materials) or use of abilities that deal damage.

The aim of the game is to not lose. Use whatever means you ca to win, destroy everything in the world if you have to. Stay alive.

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DD2000 - Project Research - Blog 2 - Valve Research

In an ideal world I would either work for Valve or Blizzard in a Level Design position. This would ideally be for a Multiplayer / Player vs Player game mode such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive map design or World of Warcraft Battleground design. I will look at Valve in this post and do a separate one for Blizzard.

As far as Valve goes, there are many ways to get work for them. One way would be to go through their own application process. This is an obvious way to go about trying to get work but it is probably the most time consuming and would require working for other companies beforehand. Valve do have a Level Design position open currently, the requirements are:

Working knowledge of a professional level design tool

Three years industry experience (or equivalent)

Experience with programming, art, or architecture a plus

Experience with shipping projects (professional or amateur) a plus

Please include recent examples of levels or environments you have made

This obviously is achievable but it would take working on another game for another studio for at least 3 years. There is another way to get work with Valve that requires a similar amount of work but let’s you work on Counter Strike instead of something different. This is through the Steam Workshop.

Steam Workshop is a place for members of the community can make custom levels, skins and game modes for their given game. This includes Counter Strike maps. Maps from the workshop are constantly being worked on and taken into the actual game during the Operations. Operations are a type of DLC event that lasts for a few months. For £4.99 players can buy into the Operation and access a whole host of new maps, game modes and skins. All of these are taken from the Workshop. Once the map is used in the game itself, the creator is paid accordingly depending on Operation Pass sales and play time on the maps. In a lot of cases, these map developers are picked up to work with Valve directly. This is definitely one way to get a foot in with Valve but it is a very saturated market with lots of creators uploading entries every day.

One issue I see with working for Valve would be location. They are located in Bellevue, Washington. This is obviously something that I would have to think about very much in depth. This does give Blizzard an edge as they have studios in the EU.

Overall as far as workflow goes, I do not have much of a preference over the 2 companies. I would thoroughly enjoy working on any of the multiplayer experiences these 2 companies offer such as Overwatch, CS:GO, WoW, Dota 2 and even some of the single player experiences such as Diablo 3 and Portal. Overall, I want to work in level design be it single player or multiplayer. In a perfect world, it would definitely be in a competitive multiplayer scenario.

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DD2000 - Project Research - Blog 1

Level Design in CS:GO.

So, my main aim in the game design industry is to work on a competitive focused game such as Counter Strike : Global Offensive or PlayerUnkown’s BattleGround. The ideal role in my head would be level design for Counter Strike working on creating and balancing maps. 

While looking into this role, I was looking at the twitter of a successful map designer called FMPONE (https://twitter.com/fmpone) and looking through some of the stuff he talks about in terms of CSGO level design. Through this twitter I found that he works for a company called Mapcore. Mapcore are an online Level Design community mainly focused around CSGO and other FPS games with lots of articles on the practices that go into designing the levels.

There are some great articles here, including some UE4 tutorials and lighting tutorials. I will be reading each one as part of my initial research and talking about what I find in future blogs.

Another interesting thing that Mapcore did for the community was a Mapping Competition for CSGO. This was a contest where developers could enter maps to be judged by various CSGO pros and analysts to judge. They are given feedback and a chance to revise and resubmit before the final results are decided. These maps are extensively playtested by the community to ensure they were all balanced and fair.

https://www.mapcore.org/

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XB2001 – Assignment 2 - Level Design Reflective Blog 4 - Final Day

So we made a fair few changes in the last day, mostly in the blueprint that caused me to change a bit of level design stuff. The main thing that was changed slightly was the location of the enemy spawners. The logic that Joe has come up with for spawning the enemies was a little different to how I imagined it when I designed the level, so to compromise I basically added more spawners dotted around the map.

As you can see from this screenshot, the white circles are the spawners now. These are in basically the same places with some extra ones in between to fill out the space. Unfortunately, due to the lack of props from our prop artist the streets felt quite empty and not having time to narrow them meant that I needed to add in more enemies to fill the gaps.

I also helped with some of the blueprint such as the Health Pot and healing system, a teleport mechanic and various UI elements. All of my blueprint in the project is highlighted in purple.

The teleport started with a simple line trace from the main camera. This is also where the Cooldown for the ability was set to started ticking down. 

Once this was done, I hid the player and changed the camera field of view to add a bit of juice to the mechanic. The visibility change was to emulate a cloud of smoke from the chimney sweep. Once this was done and a delay was added, I set the player mesh visible again.

The player is then teleported to the new location and the cooldown loop begins. This reduces the value of the TeleportCD float until it is 0 once again. At 0 the loop stops and the ability is useable again.

The Heal system was very simple. It just checks to see if you have less than max HP (100) and if you have any Health Pots or not. If this was all okay then pressing E would increase your maximum HP by 25 and take 1 Health Pot away.

For the health pot itself, it was a simple pickup that added to the HealthPots integer on the character blueprint. The top part of this blueprint just spins the pot slowly in the map to draw attention to it.

I added this blueprint to the end of the enemies Death script to add a chance for the rat to drop a health pot. It just generates a random integer from 0-5, and if it comes back as 3 then it will spawn a health pot. This gives a 1/5 chance for each enemy to drop one.

The last blueprint work I did was adding UI to the game. I added tutorials to the first few important bits such as fist spawner and first health pot as well as Teleport Cooldown and Health Pot counter. I also added and Start screen and an End screen that Laura made in photoshop.

We made one huge mistake that was only noticed after cooking out the game and zipping it up to hand in online. We forgot to add the walls to block off the Boss from being accessed from the back alley. This alley was added to let the player dictate how they tackle the boss fight. Unfortunately the boss is there and killable from behind before bringing the cheese to the area. This was a super simple thing that was missed and has since been changed. 

Overall, super happy with the final product and how the last stages of our crunch time went. It was a bit stressful but overall a fun experience dealing with last minute changes and debugging!

[chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog]

DD2000 - Research

So looking into Quake’s design is very interesting. A lot of the most popular and well known mechanics were actually not even planned to be in the game, they are happy accidents. Rocket Jump, Strafe Jump and Bunny Hopping were bugs that everyone liked so they were kept in the game.

This is especially interesting as the Bunny Hop and Strafe Jump have been included in every Counter Strike game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafe-jumping

These mechanics aren’t only interesting for the players to use but for spectators to watch also. They are ways to break the intended course of the game in a way that is often unpredictable. This causes massive crowd and internet reaction and hype as they are impressive plays to make.

These mechanics also gave birth to huge communities playing special community made game modes that incorporate them including HnS, KZ and Surfing. 

https://www.gametracker.com/search/cs/?query=hns 

These are servers still up for HnS on the first version of Counter-Strike, there are 100x this amount on the newest version CS:GO

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DD2000 - Research

Football has also evolved in a similar way to eSports. The early football tournaments held at schools such as Eton were structured in a similar way to early eSports competition. One major difference is that Football evolved over hundreds of years to become the Premiership we know today. This could be something in the future for eSports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_football_competitions

You can see all the various forms of Football from Australian Football to Rugby have had a form of competition record since the 1800s. This is a lot more time to develop compared to eSports that is only 40 years old.

[chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog]

DD2000 - Research

I have chosen Design and the Human for this project using the topic of eSports. Mainly looking at how the tournaments and ladders have been designed and how they copy the progression of older mediums such as Football. I also looked into how the games played at these tournaments were designed to to encourage fair play, balance and spectatorship.

I found that video game tournaments actually wen’t back a lot further than expected. 

https://www.polygon.com/2012/10/20/3529662/first-game-tournament-intergalactic-spacewar-olympics-held-40-years

This article outlines that tournament and it’s ruleset. It is quite close to something that could be found in a modern tournament today.

I also looked back at the first Counter Strike tournament and how the setup for that was actually not far from how it is today.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/counterstrike/2000_CPL_Europe_Cologne

The scale is just larger but ultimately it is the same thing. 

[chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog]

XB2001 – Assignment 2 - Level Design Reflective Blog 3

So overall I think that I tackled level design in a well thought out manner. Everything was done with a lot of planning going on before and we managed to stick relatively close to the original plan. I think there were definitely things that I think I could have done better as a level designer and as a team player as a whole but I am generally happy with how things went.

The beginning of the project started with a lot of planning and hypothetical design. This is one area I think I could have done better in. I think I made a few game play decisions without consulting the technical designed Joe first. I had a vision of how I wanted the level to play out and I gave it a lot of thought and came to decisions kind of on my own. There were times nearer the end of the project where I was asking Joe if he had done stuff that he doesn’t even remember me mentioning was in there. One of these points was the 2 side alleys locked behind fences where some health packs / power ups would be hidden. I came to these decisions to put stuff their without really consulting Joe and when I asked if they were done yet he let me know he didn’t even know they existed. This is why they had to be scrapped in the end, because of my lack of communication in this aspect. This was not really a recurring issue, but I definitely should have voiced my ideas louder. 

I think the ideas I had, even those that weren’t communicated properly, were generally quite good to make the level interesting to play. Little things like the randomly spawning cheese to spawn in the boss added a lot to the level and I think it would not be the same without it. It gives the player a clear objective that they need to complete and takes the focus away from purely just slaughtering the rats. It lets the player feel like they are progressing through a level or quest in an RPG.

I think I worked very well with Laura throughout the process of putting the level together. We both shared feedback on every aspect and made changes accordingly. The main area this was prevalent was in the floor as I mentioned in my last post. This took a fair amount of iteration and back-and-forth between myself and Laura. Overall this process made the level stronger and feel a lot more natural to traverse. My workflow of blocking out the level with boxes of the correct scale to the floor also made it a lot easier for Laura to begin modelling the houses using these boxes as a base. This was a foolproof way of getting the houses made without having to move models into UE4 over and over again to get the scale right.

The home straight of this project was also something I think I carried out well. Taking the enemies and player into the level Laura was working on and ensuring everything felt right was essential to getting a smooth feeling game. I made sure the pacing was right and the player couldn’t skip through all of the enemies easily. Before putting all the final pieces together I tested merging the projects together and ensured everything worked smoothly as a test run for when Joe and Laura had both finished their portions of the project.

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XB2001 – Assignment 2 - Level Design Reflective Blog 2

Once I had the main aims of the game planned out with the team, I began to block out the level starting with the floor. The floor went through many changes for this level but it all started in Maya. I mapped out the first bit of street using a plane and extruding it forward to make the basic shape of the road I wanted.

Once this was done, I extruded outwards to get the right width for the floor.

After this I extruded the edges upwards to make the curbs that would lead up to the house placed on either side.

I then continued this until I had a large chuck on shape that I could work with and start getting a feel for.

I added a sphere to signify the player’s head for scale and continued on.

Once I was happy with this chunk I could continue on making the rest of the floor and getting it ready to place into Unreal Engine.

This is the final product of the first iteration for the floor with a house for scale. This was taken into unreal where I began to place cubes all along it to fill out the world.

This is the first street where the player spawns.

And this is the rest of the map. Once this was done, we could really start to get a sense for how the world felt to the player, even without any artwork in. It also allowed Laura to start modelling the houses as we could use the orange cubes as a base for her to build on. I believe this way of working was quite efficient as it was a technique shown to us by Ewan in class. We followed that procedure throughout the whole process of crafting this level.

I also designed the player path for a Sewer level that was originally going to house the boss, but we decided to make the one level awesome instead of rushing through it to add another.

This is the player path and boss platform for the sewer that was ultimately scrapped.

I will add some more screenshots of the level blocked out below. These will include the side alleys and sewer entrance.

Once this was all in we decided to make some changes to the floor. Ewan pointed out to us that it was very flat and it became immediately obvious that this was true. I took the floor back into Maya and raised the center of the floor upwards to create the V shape that roads generally boast for water flow. Once this was done, I added a few divets and potholes to make the floor flow more naturally.

Overall I think this stage of the level design work went well. It was a smooth process where myself and Laura could work together swapping files back and forward until it was at a place where we could leave it be for her to go away and start the 3D modelling of the houses and the rest of the environment.

[chriswilliamsfutureworks-blog]

XB2001 – Assignment 2 - Level Design Reflective Blog 1

In my first 2 blog posts I will run through specifically what I did throughout this project and briefly touch on what I believe went well and what didn’t. I will also go through some of the ideas we had that ended up not being used due to time constraints. I will start at the very start with the plan for the upper ground level.

Before we look at this, I will talk about the actual game including mechanics and objectives. You play as a young male chimney sweep in Victorian London. Your borough has been infested with rats and you take it upon yourself to eradicate them. So the player spawns at the beginning of a street with houses and shops on either side. At the end of said street they see an open hole in the ground with rats hovering outside the entrance. This is the last straw and you take it upon yourself to finally rid the area of these vermin. The player then traverses the level bashing rats and closing the sewers they come out of until reaching the main sewer pipe. Using a piece of cheese found in a neighbors house you lure out the Rat King and challenge him to a duel. This cheese will randomly be spawned in one of the several open houses found in the area. Using a combination of different abilities such as a Teleport, Health Potions and Attacks the player can move around the level and battle the various types of rats.

Pictured above is the original plan of the level I drew on the first night after solidifying the plan for the game. I designed this level in a very symmetrical way using Level Design principles I learned looking into Counter-Strike’s map design, specifically the map de_dust2. What makes that map great is the variety of routes that players can take to keep the map interesting. They can go directly on the main path or take smaller side alleys. They can even make a cut through the entire map to explore the other side without having to backtrack too majorly. The idea for this was to design a map that lead the player to believe that there is a lot more space than there actually is in the level. This worked very well for the amount of time we were given to complete the project as, while not being too much work for me to make the map larger and more complex, it would have put a lot more pressure on the rest of my team. 

This is the Top Down view of the map after blocking it out. I stuck to the design very closely and it worked out very well. I feel that the layout of the level not only felt natural to play, but achieved what I wanted it to. It felt large. I think an improvement I could have made to the layout would be to make it less perfectly shaped. London does not have that many right angles like this in it’s street layout. I do feel that this did not actually take anything away from the final project but it is still work mentioning. Once I had the level blocked out, I took the top down image into photo shop and mapped out enemy spawns and health packs. The initial idea to have health packs on the map was changed after some iteration and they now drop from enemies slain. The red dots now signify the holes the rats come out of. There were also to be 2 areas reachable after the player collected a key from the gardens but they were removed due to time constraints on the project. My initial idea for these was to have 2 large health packs at the end of them for the player to earn. This was then changed to unlockable extra abilities the player can use. 

Overall I liked the design for the game, it has a good amount of strategy and some chance to keep things interesting. On top of this it has a nice layout to encourage exploration and multiple playthroughs.