Responsibilities:

• Initial idea conceptualization and research (location, gameplay ideas, narrative ideas)
• Own the level design process from concept to final blockout
• Prototyping new game mechanics

Description:

The idea was to create a POI for 4vs4 Players gameplay. The center building of the POI should also be an arena for the boss. The setting is Louisiana around the end of 19th century. It’s A personal Project inspired by the E3-2017 trailer for the Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age (which now knows as Hunt Showdown).

My Process Breakdown:

Below you can see my level design process for this project:

1. Initial Idea and references gathering:

• To help with ideas that support the main idea I do a research about the area, location, people and time period. It’s surprising that an interesting gameplay mechanic can come from reading strories about the place.
  For example, the sinking bodies in a pond with alligators as a way to separate the teams came from an old story from that time.
• I usually gather not so many references. I prefer to find 1-2 main references to help with ideas visualisation and the rest comes from iterations in the blockout phase. This way I make sure that the function/gameplay comes first.
• The other thing I usually do is to have a rough atmosphere and mood reference. It helps to have other ideas alligned and coherent.
  Eg. “it’s foggy night so, this shadow over here will provide a nice cover/hiding spot.” Compared to “It’s a bright day at noon, I’ll need to place a cover here to have a hiding spot.”

2. Paper Plan:

• I mainly use paper plan to organize my ideas spatially.
• The paper plan provides rough ideas about the scale of the areas and their relative location.
• I prefer to add details in blockout as it has better scale and overview. And it’s better to judge if an addition or change will support the gameplay or not when you can immideatelly see it or play it.

3. Blockout Iterations:

I’m rather good thinking in 3D. So, as soon as I figure out the ideas for the level /location and roughly their relative location to each other I switch to 3D  blockout.

• First and furthermost I figure out the scale in 3D, using player/enemies/human like objects 3D models as references.
• Then I build roughly my ideas from the paper plan and adjust and enchance the spaces if needed. Bringing some new ideas that hard to put in 2D plan.
• After the scale is established it’s easier for me to take a screenshot of an existing part of the blockout and then overpaint it with new ideas. This way I know that the new ideas will follow the scale and fit very well. I use this method almost all the time on other projects.
• What I also do is setting the rough atmosphere/mood early on. This helps to make gameplay, story and visuals more coherent.
• I keep the geo well organized to make changes and iteration easier.

Final Screenshots:

Here you can see the final blockout and the overlays of the options the Players have. Unfortunatelly I don’t have a walkthorugh video for this project. I do hope screenshots will do.