Forgotten City

Team Size: 7
Responsibilities: Level Design (Blockout + Scripting), Narrative/Quest Design, Production
Duration: 14 weeks
Tools/Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Contributions to the project:

Level Design:
- Pitched level flow to the team along with the other level designer, keeping the game intensity curve and player experience in mind.
- Blocked out and iterated on areas of the level, focusing mainly on Act 4, where the player gets a new ability, following the shape language and maintaining the visual aesthetics and composition.
- Ensured clarity of the player's objective in the level through visual guides, landmarks, and collectibles.
Level Scripting:
- Scripted environment puzzles, interactions, and level sequence cinematics.
- Worked with the programmers and tech artists to optimize scripting workflows.
- Worked with the gameplay programmer to create a system to collect playtesting metrics in game to improve the level design.
Narrative/Quest Design:
- Wrote dialogue barks for the character to convey story beats.
- Created an interactive Twine experience to convey the backstory for the game and catch up the player on what happened before this level, as this quest was set in the middle of the game.
Production:
- Kept track of deliverables, successful team communication
- Managed project timelines around playtesting opportunities and kept the stakeholders in loop.

Gameplay Video:

For this project, we had 14 weeks to make a third-person action adventure level as a part of our semester project. We started the project with pre-production where we brainstormed different world settings for our level while creating a golden spike.

Then we finalized a magical world setting set in underwater ruins and created the game mechanics for that while simultaneously working on pitching two different level flow ideas internally. Once we finalized the ideas, we did our own worldbuilding and started production with blockouts of different acts. We playtested different acts every week with players outside the team and with our Subject Matter Expert, implementing feedback in every iteration.

In the last few weeks, we worked on tweaking the blockouts for a more polished feeling and added final touches to the VFX and systems in the level. The average time for completion of the level for a playtester was around 45 minutes.

Overview:

Level Flow

Details:

2D Map

Screenshots

Process

Major Learnings and Iterations

Composition and Framing

In Act 4, the player gets a new ability from a temple in the world. The temple needed to seem important to the player which wasn't the case in the early iterations.
For this, I added a narrow S-shaped cave-like space before the player can see the as seen in the first GIF to make sure that the temple is not initially visible and to add a funnel and reveal moment.
For the temple itself, I added floating rocks above the temple, making it seem like it had a halo, and also added rocks and debris around it. This made a significant difference in how the players perceived the space and solved the problem of it not appearing important enough.

An example of interesting framing that I added where the player goes near a coin to collect it and when they come near it, they see a chest from a hole in the wall which gives them a little pleasant surprise and a reward for exploration.

Here, I place a statue on the right which is used for the position switch mechanic and will be used in a puzzle inside the building.
When the player goes inside the temple, there will be space to place 3 statues to activate an energy ball, but will only see 2 statues inside.
The statue shown in the image is the third one and it is outside the temple, supposed to be seen by the player when they enter.
However, initially, players were not able to remember this statue.
So, I decided to add some lighting in its background, keep the statues red to distinguish them from the environment, and also add a coin chest next to see such that the player can see it.
After this, players were able to remember that there was one statue outside and some players even decided to go there directly.

Framing of the statues and puzzle inside the temple

Playtest and Feedback

In Act 4, we decided to give the player a new ability - Vision Change which allowed them to see things in the environment that are not visible to the naked eye.
This ability was intended to give them additional platforming challenges and also abilities like multiple consecutive dashes and double jump.
However, we encountered some problems while doing that and I found out the cause for it and worked with the other level designer to solve it using the steps below.

Problem

Cause

Solution

Result