Something With Perspective | Sebastianbinder

Something with Perspective

Winner of IGAD Year 1 Best Game Design, Crowd Favorite and Best Overall Game

Summary

Project Information

Genre:

Team Size:

Project Duration:

Engine:

Platform:

Primary Role:

Secondary Role:

Puzzle / Platformer

9 Members

May 2019 - July 2019

Unreal Engine 4

Released on PC

Level Design

Game Design

Description

A 3rd person puzzle platformer in which the player takes on the guise of a monk who utilizes their ability to switch Perspective between 2D and 3D to traverse a distorted world.

Responsibilities

Level Design:

Created 1/2 of the level content for the final product.
Researching, designing and building a level that functions from both from a 2D and 3D perspective.
Maintained cross-disciplinary communication to ensure smooth implementation of core mechanics as well as the integration of the art pass.
Created concept level used to pitch the product.
Established key level metrics based on character movement.
Designed central hub area.
Iterated and improved on the level flow based on playtesting.

Other:

Leading brainstorms and the development of features, later documenting progress in the GDD.
Balanced character movement to allow for smooth traversal and develop precise metrics.
Took on the role of scrum master by leading sprint planning, retrospectives, reviews and prioritizing tasks.
Collaborated with Artists, UI Designers and Sound Designers to ensure feedback for player actions was implemented into the game.

Level Design Process

Development:

For this project I worked all the way from the early stages of concepting to releasing a playable build.
I fully developed a level from the initial blockout to a whitebox and finally to a completed level with a full art pass.
However this was a long process that all started with the core mechanic dimension shifting.

Early Project Stages

Dimension Shifting:

The core mechanic of the game allows the player to shift between the 3rd and 2nd dimension.
This opened opened up a lot of interesting level design opportunities since in the 3rd dimension the player has the ability to go behind an object.
While in the 2nd dimension the objects that might have been far apart are suddenly close together.
With this in mind I started to create a number of early prototypes.

Example of Early Blockout Moment:

To right is an example of a early prototype where the player switches from 3D into 2D to traverse across the gap.
However at the start of the project the level design was quite limited because the player could only snap into 2D from one side.
This meant that the level had to basically be a long straight line as can be seen in the video.

Limitations to the Mechanic

Due to how the mechanic worked from a technical perspective we ran into the problem that objects placed within a certain area of each other would overlap causing problems since the player wouldn't know what platform they are on until they move back into 3D.

Top Down

Objects placed in the red zone will cause the objects to overlap when shifting into a 2D perspective.

The solution was to have platforms on different x and y axis, or to to lift them up on the z axis. As such a upwards moving spiral generates the least amount of issues.

2D view shows have none of the objects overlap.

Calibrating the Character Movement:

Around this time I also focused on creating precise character metrics that could be utilized to determine key level metrics such as the maximum distance between platforms.
At the time the best way I had to measure this was to create a static copy of the character every few frames to measure the exact jump curve.

Example of Later Blockout Moment:

As the project evolved we were able to expand the the dimension shifting to to function from the 4 cardinal directions instead of just one.
This meant that as a level designer I was now able to start building more intricate puzzles that would require the player to switch perspective multiple times.
In addition to this we also implemented side mechanics like the moving platform and iterated on the player character as can be seen in the video.

Blockout

Level Philosophy:

For my level I aimed to create a tower that the player would climb with various puzzles along the way.
The reason I picked a tower is due to the fact that early playtesting showed that it was quite easy to get lost when transitioning between dimensions and having a landmark such as a tower would greatly help players orient themselves.
The 2nd reason was that as mentioned earlier a spiral shape would cause the least amount of overlap between platforms and it was quite easy to wrap this shape around the tower.
I utilized my earlier prototype moments and simply implement them into the level for a fast workflow.

Blockout

Different Level Layouts

Once I completed the initial blockout I played around with different level layouts to see if I could make the level more interesting. However in the end I stuck with the initial blockout as it simply worked the best.

Here I split the tower into 3 little islands where the player would complete a section before moving on.

Again I split the tower into separate sections however the benefit here was that when the player looked at it from the right perspective the tower would be whole.

I even tried completely removing the tower but as expected this didn't work at all.

Hub Level:

During this stage of the project I also create a hub level that would serve as a way to track the player progression as they complete the different levels.
It would also allow the player to choose which level they wanted to enter first much like in crash bandicoot 3.
This was possible since the different levels had similar difficulty curves.
The building was created with a high level of architectural detail in order to help guide the artists during their modeling.
However later into the project the hub level was cut due to the fact that we didn't have enough time to complete it.

Whitebox and Art Pass

Whitebox:

Once I completed the blockout I began to test it to identify what the core issues where and what was inhibiting the player flow.
I quickly found that having too many platforms in any one location only confused the player so I used this information to cut down certain areas and built a improved version of the tower.
I also fully implemented missing mechanics (such as the objective) and added trigger volumes such as the saving and loading.

Whitebox

Blockout

Release

Transition to Art Pass:

Once I had completed the whitebox we had very little time left before our deadline and as such I had to stop iterating on the level and hand it off to the art team.
However this was my first time working with a art team and as such I ran into a number of problems.

Problems:

Due to some poor communication with the artists a number of the assets that they had created were either the wrong size (which caused issues with the metrics) or would cause problems when shifting between dimensions.

Outcome:

Unfortunately this meant that platforms had to be re-sized by hand and certain art assets had to be removed from the scene entirely.
But this served as a valuable learning experience on how stronger communication with the artists along with asset tests is needed to prevent these type of problems.

Comparison Between Whitebox and Release

Release and Takeaways

Release:

However despite the problems that occurred with the art pass it also provided us with the opportunity to provide additional guidance to the player through the level using assets such as the trees or gateways.
At this point in time the level was ready to be released and it felt amazing to get the game into the players hands and see them play it.

Takeaways:

This project was amazing to work on and I believe the game came quite far especially considering the small team and time constraints.
However I also made a number of mistakes that looking back I could have avoided.

Due to our inexperience we focused very heavily on just creating content rather than planning it out and following a structure.
As a consequence this project felt more like a long global game jam rather than creating an actual product.
This is also one of the reasons that we had to cut a lot of the features that we came up with and ended up having just the perspective switch as our only mechanic.
In our case it worked out alright however its certainly not a consistent workflow.

I could also have created better asset metrics and properly communicated them to the team to avoid the problems as mentioned earlier.

Thank you so much for reading through this section of my portfolio.