With Runaway, I started off with a rough sketch of what I wanted the world to look like, then moved on to planning chapter-by-chapter player flow and the way players would move through the game. Through this I was also able to plan character encounters, level expectations, and how story beats line up with gameplay.

As Runaway falls within the cosy game genre, the levels were designed to encourage a moment to breathe and explore the environment. I designed these levels to be engaging and interesting to experience, working closely with narrative, music, and mechanics to polish the player experience.

As I work in game narrative as well as game development, I have a good understanding of the way game and narrative feed into each other. Because of this, narrative and game cohesion is always a priority in both the level design and the narrative script.

Greyboxing is one of the most important aspects of level design. It gives developers the chance to plot out player flow, where to guide their focus, and how to plan the way they experience the level. In Bloodlust, I planned this all out on paper first, then built out a greybox level for playtesting. Once the playtest was complete, I re-planned the level and its changes, and sketched out an annotated plan for continuing forward.

The main puzzle mechanic in Bloodlust is a word and book puzzle that allows players to search through lab notes, finding circled numbers that -- when put in the order of command -- reveal the pin code for the door that gives them access to the next part of the tutorial. There are also some basic key-collecting puzzles so that the weight of the tutorial is not just on word-based puzzles.

Experience with wrting a playtester feedback form, receiving feedback, and implementing it through an iterative and collaborative process. Any feedback that was not implemented was only put aside because of a shift in concept or mechanic that rendered it no longer applicable. 

Within a team of level designers, we sat down and discussed how the beats of the game would play out, and what objectives and milestones needed to be hit in each level. I created the first level of the game and did set dressing, but later in the project we were instructed to switch levels between us to improve on someone else's work. Unfortunately most if not all of the set dressing I did on my level was changed, but the level flow and design remained. 

This project spanned across one semester, and I worked within a team of developers, animators, and VFX artists in a studio environment where we worked in sprints. We used Miro and Clickup to track sprints and tasks.

On this project, I was given a pre-existing HUD level and was given the task of set dressing and fixing it. As this section hadn't been updated in a while, I ended up doing a full redesign of the space, working with 3D assets and effects to put together a cohesive level.