Fallen Down
Project Specs
Type of Project: Academic Solo
Role: Level Designer
Length of Project: 3 Weeks
Overview
Fallen Down is a solo, 3 week project, for a Level Design class. My main goal with the project was to convey a 5 arc story structure that was only unraveled through player curiosity. In addition to this, I thought of who the player character was in this setting and delivered a very deliberate player experience filled with senses of uneasiness but also a sense of serenity in an otherwise depressing and empty space.
Maya was used to create the blockout and once the segment was playtested, iterated, and finally validated, I followed it with an art pass in Maya and Substance Painter.
Planning
Bubble Map
Top-Down Map
To start out this project, I created a bubble map along with a top-down map to not only help with blank canvas syndrome but also ensure that I had a guideline for what I wanted to make.
The bubble map was created to help plan out the possibility space of the level as well as what areas were accessible from each area. In addition to this, the reason I chose to use a bubble map for this stage of planning is because this process makes it easier to make changes to the order of rooms easily.
Once I felt the bubble map was in a good spot, I moved onto my top-down map where I could start visualizing how I wanted to physically lay out my space.
The top-down map helped me create a theme but more importantly helped build a cognitive map of what I was trying to build. In addition to this, it also allowed me the opportunity to start clumping areas together and form a complete narrative arc.
Scene Composition
Once my planning was over, it was time to put my plans into a Unity project. My first step of that process was creating a fully developed scene composition and to begin I used primitives to block-out how I wanted my scene to look.
The colors I assigned to each primitive in the block-out were represented by visual tags in how they would interact with the player in a playable space.
Purple objects were objects that are key to showing / blocking player sightlines.
The orange object is supposed to be the landmark/dominant.
Red objects were hazards in the sense of not wanting the player to interact with it.
Yellow objects were climbable or meant to be jumped onto.
Green objects were raised objects that are meant to be stood on by the player
Composition Progress Pictures
Building a strong mental model
A goal of mine with this project was to help the player create a strong cognitive map or mental model of the map. This is important as without one it is really easy for players to be lost and so I created two solutions to help address this problem.