Big Game Project – Week 3 – Level Design

We are now three weeks into production on our vertical slice for the Gotland Game conference. Our group consists of 7 people and the game we are making is called NAAR.

Most of my time so far has been spent on the level design. So I started by making some simple sketches on the layout after a few iterations I had something that was ready for the next step. I started to block out the level in 3ds max with simple meshes. I started with the shell of the level I.e. the walls and floors, I did this for test the scale of the level. I didn’t go into the small details of the level but placed some of the geometry to test the placement of structures in the game world.

The perspective view in 3ds Max is not that good and it’s hard to see so I tried to get it in to engine as fast as possible.

I’m not quite sure on how I am going to do the floor of the cave yet, if I am going to use the same meshes as the walls. The AI might not work that good on uneven ground and the animation doesn’t work that great either.

There were some things that made it hard to move forward with the design, we were unsure on how we were going to do the tutorial for the game and were it should be placed in the worlds, if we were going to make it inside the cave or have an outside area. But after some discussion we decided that it should be placed outside, it will require some more work but we thought that it would be worth it.

we are going to have some puzzles but due to the time frame on the project we don’t know how complex the puzzles can be, so the puzzles of the level can more be described as obstacles, the player will have to use combinations of different magic he/she has at their disposal to break down a wall or something similar. So I’ve made the level into different rooms with smaller passages in-between so it can be blocked with door or breakable rocks.