The Sable Church
Type: Course project: 'Individual Study Activity'
Learning goals: Contextual level design, Unreal Engine 5, Hard-surface modeling
Software used: Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Quixel, Substance Painter
Key takeaways: Unreal Engine 5 allows for quick and carefree iteration for artists & designers.
Cutting most of the proposed design and shifting/ narrowing focus helps making the final product more convincing and polished in projects with a tight production window.
The Sable Church was a project I did during my first year at the HKU. Its goal was to research and practise a new technique/area of expertise. I chose to dive deeper into level design and complex 3D modeling, withing the context of the world of Dark Souls III. I challenged myself with designing and creating a small part of a level that could fit within the world of the game.
During the project, I had to quickly move through the stages of designing, blocking out and production and had to learn how to efficiently manage my time and goals. It helped me get a better sense of distribution of time and resources needed in a project
The most important lesson I took from this course were the importance of a strong and detailed level design, both in written form and blockouts. Starting on production too early without a strong foundation will cause gaps and mismatches in the level and it will force you to go back to the drawing board too often, losing time in the process.
Research & Concepting
Once the scope and context of the project was decided, I set out to research the the world of Dark Souls III. I started out by picking an area in the world of the game where there was limited information and details on and started puzzling the pieces together. One of the things I started realizing early on was how interwoven and thought out the overall world of Dark Souls III was, and that it was going to be a challange to make my interpretation of this area convincing.
I gathered all the relevant information I was going to be using a lot in a reference book, which was comparable to an internal mini-wiki. During the project I went back and forth between my design and the information in the reference book often to make sure I was staying within the bubble of Dark Souls.
Final Design & Blocking out the level
Initially I planned to create an environment that would contain The Sable Church and a town around it. In this version, there was more attention for level progression and the possible paths the player could take. I drafted a rough layout of the route and key items the player would take/use and started working on the blockout.
After a coaching session and a critical look at the blockout, I decided to cut the town out of the design completely, to save time needed for the creation of the assets and allowing me to put more focus into the interior of the church. That ended up being a strategic decision, since the planned time for the modeling of the assets didn't quite match up with the actual time needed.
Building the level & Player interactions
After choosing to cut the town out of the design, I started working on modeling the interior of the church, taking inspiration from gothic architecture, in-game objects and descriptions, and other church/cathedral themed buildings in Dark Souls.
Aside from the visual part of the experience, the player needed to feel some measure of agency while exploring the area, so I decided to build in some challenges in the form of platforming and pathfinding. And to make it true to the Dark Souls experience, I added a gigantically long elevator at the end the level.
The average 'playtime' to reach the end of the experience is about 3-5 minutes.
