Key Responsibilities: Details

Category Game Design, Project Management, Level Design

Production 2 Months

Type Final project @ VFS

Engine Unreal Engine 4.19

Made in 06/2018 to 07/2018

Team of 5

Established the games metrics.
Designed multiple 2D layouts.
Communicated with prop artist to establish environment art.
Set dressed the level
Assessed risks.
Planned team's schedule.
Used Agile Management.
In charge of writing GDD.
Worked with a 5 collaborators.
Designed and implemented the menu systems.

Student project made over 2 months in a team of 5.

Initial Design

Once production started, we based our movement system on the vehicle blueprint movement component from Unreal, we made that decision because we felt it closer to how a quadruped should move. With that in mind, I made a few basic whitebox levels using the landscape spline tool basing myself in tracks that would overlap each other to promote collision.

After we achieved milestone 1, we realized the vehicle movement component wasn't really working for what we wanted. With that in mind, I changed the schedule so one of the programmers could reprogram our movement system to be based of a third person movement component.

The new movement was designed to resemble a car, while giving the freedom of movement a character has, we achieved this by adding acceleration, also only letting player move forward, and not being able to turn the camera more then 45 degrees.

Download GDD

Changing level direction

After the big change on our movement system, I had to start experimenting with different combinations of battle arena maps and racing tracks. We kept the racing tracks design in because it gives an incentive to the players to keep moving and try to almost never stop, which was one of our pillars.

I started adding more and more elements of battle arena games as I iterated on the level, to not only make players keep moving, but also to create nice flows and routes in the level, so the player would never have to stop.

Environment

Initially we planned to base our level inside of a cave surrounded by void, but as we started to mess around with the fog and lighting we realized it would be very challenging to make the void look interesting. In our game there are two teams, one is the fire team the other is the ice team, so we decided to maintain the idea of the cave, but instead of having void, we divided the map into two halves, ice and fire.

Once the direction was established, I made sure to have a big space surrounding the map, so it would look like a massive cave and there would be enough space for players to get knocked of the map. After that I solidified the layout using the landscape in Unreal engine 4. Once the layout was done, we exported it to maya to reduce the amount of tris and clean up the geo.

After that the level went into substance painter, where our artisst could have more control over the materials being applied to it. That last process made the level look a lot more polished. When I got the map back, I placed two spotlights on the red side to make it look even better and finally our technical artist took care of lighting the blue side.