GAME DESIGNER - Technical & Level Designer
Role(s)
Level Design | Game Design | Quest Design | Technical Design
Collaborators
Valerio Bullini & Herman Petterson
Summary
Group-based level design project where 3 of us had to work together to create a coherent quest line, and then create a corresponding amount of levels showcasing the story.
The narrative for our levels involved a detective investigating a cult and the shady business they were getting up to, before suffering a mishap and needing to try and fix themselves. It was set against a backdrop of a cyberpunkesque setting in a mega building under the cult's control.
My area of responsibility within the chain was the final level in the chain, as well as the technical implementation of the non-Euclidean spaces in the area.
YEAR & LENGTH
2024, 3.5 Weeks
GENRE
Psychological, Investigative, Trippy, Level Design Project
Engine
Unreal 5.3
Full walkthrough - No commentary
My level w/ some commentary
(Mostly me, with some comments from a lecturer)
Inspiration & Idea
We created the level as part of a workshop, where we were asked to create a level based on 1 or more selected media. We chose to go with a combination of "Cyberpunk" and "Stranger Things".
We wanted to use the setting of "Cyberpunk", a technologically advanced dystopian future, and combine it with the weirder, stranger elements of "Stanger Things" to see what we could create.
We ended up exploring the idea of the potential of the actual supernatural happening within a world like "Cyberpunk", where due to things like "Brain Dances", you can experience memories and moments that aren't your own, and how having that overlapping your own consciousness can further mess with what you believe to be real.
We came up with the story of an Investigator looking into a cult that has formed and been gaining traction within the city, with reports of human sacrifices and the like being tied to them.
The investigator (the player character), has been investigating the cult for a bit now, and has found a Megabuilding that has ties to the cult. They've now infiltrated the building, taking residence there, and is beginning the next stage of their investigation into the cult.
We felt that exploring that side of a Cyberpunk-esque world could be quite interesting narratively, and could make for interesting level sequences.
Level Design
For the overall Level Design, we made a central level to serve as a main point that the player would traverse through while heading to the other locations spread throughout it, with each one of the member's levels integrating into the central level in a different way, with some people's levels integrating more than others.
This helped to ensure a level of narrative and level based consistency between the 3 of us, as each level that we made had to tie in to this central theme/level in some form, otherwise it would break consistency in a way that we may not have wanted.
Looking at the flow for the level we tried to keep the pacing on the slower side, having it be something more akin to an experiential/story based mission chain. As such, we do aim to have it feel a bit exploratory and give the player options in what they want to do, but not have it be an open world affair.
We also aimed to have it so that the overall "Weirdness" of the level was inversely proportional to the "Level/Visual Complexity". So the overall visual complexity, with the looks of where you can go and what's in the level starts off relatively high, with many things happening, but as time goes on, we start to remove elements as the weirdness starts to ramp up.
LEVEL DESIGN: The Basement
My part in the quest chain/level progression was the last section, taking part in a section of the basement complex located underneath the megabuilding.
The investigator has now found their way into the basement, where they believe the sacrifice took place, and is trying to find the body of the man whose life he's experiencing.
The idea for my level was for things to really dive into the weird and wonderful, and really make the player question whether or not they were experiencing the supernatural.
The player would have a glitching overlay effect on their screen for the majority of their time in the level, so taking this into account, I dialled down the overall visual complexity, wanting to stick to more basic shapes and keep the player more on track by making the level more linear and straightforward in design. Seeing as your approaching the end of a quest chain, now isn't the time to wander off and get completely lost in the underground.
The main set piece of my level was the non-Euclidean area puzzle. I wanted this to be the big piece of the area, as this is where the weirdness really cranks up, to the point of reality warping within the level. The main issue was ensuring the player knew they were cycling through the same rooms. As such, I tried to ensure that each room had something going on in it so that the player could start to make a mental map of where they were and how each room was connected.
Technical Design
For the Technical Design for my part of the level, I worked with creating doors that the player could walk through normally one way, but if approached from the opposite direction, would render and take the player to a different room. This was done to try and achieve the effect of a non-Euclidean space, where things are occupying spaces that shouldn't logically be possible.
For example, when the player first interacts with one of these doors, they enter into a small room, turn around, and then the room they came from is gone, and taken up by a room that is very different.
The doors were made by attaching a Scene capture component to each door, linking those doors together so that each door knows which door to teleport the player to, and then displaying, using a material, what each door would see to the other door.
The Scene capture would move relative to the player's position to the door, to give the illusion of the player looking into and around the room before stepping through the door.
I also set up the ending sequence and spawning & despawning of things within my level.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I would say I'm pretty happy with the idea we came together to create. Considering the constraints we had, and the fact that my level took place during the ending parts of the chain inside of a basement, I feel like I could've done more but I'm ultimately happy with the technical aspect and the overall pacing. I feel like I could've used some more interesting shapes and added a lot more detail however without affecting the player too much.
I did have some issues with the teleporter doors, which caused some major delays and made me cut some parts entirely due to time constraints after having fixed the issues.
The first, and easiest issue, was that the guide I used to help with the creation of the doors was made for an earlier version of Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, this meant some things had changed in engine with available nodes and what-not. I had to experiment a bit to get the correct effect, but it didn't take too long.
The biggest issue with the doors and how're they're made is the Scene Capture component, or at least how I used it. Seeing as, from my understanding, they're basically cameras, having them in my level effectively meant I had about 8 additional cameras rendering at the same time as the normal player cam. This tanked performance, and I ended up not finding a decent solution honestly. Instead, I opted to simply turn the cameras on and off using triggers, so that they'd be active when the player was in the nearby area and turn off when they weren't. Not an elegant solution by any means, though I would like to go back and fiddle around more to see if I can find something better at some point, as I feel like this is because I don't have a full grasp of the Scene Capture options inside of Unreal.
The last, and most notable issue for myself, is that the Scene captures are tied to the player's camera, and seeing as the player camera bobs up and down while moving, this means the Scene Capture does as well, which leads to weird clipping issues with the door. I'm relatively sure I could've locked the Z-axis so that that didn't happen, but I forgot.
There was going to be a second puzzle, involving a set of infinite stairs that the player would have to travel up and down in order to figure out a code to end the puzzle, similar to a safe lock, but after fixing the issues I had before, as well as realizing that the non-Euclidean room puzzle took some people a bit longer to solve than I had initially thought, I decided to scrap that as it wouldn't have fit the time constraints, and I'm sure that I wouldn't have been able to make it easily solvable within the time I had left.