Colony 19
Colony 19
Level Designer / Writer
Colony 19 is a horror VR 3D platformer where the player has lost both of their legs and must climb up this massive megastructure in a dystopian society where humans are used as livestock and harvested for their body parts.
(This game is currently in the early stages of development.)
In this stage of development, the goal was to create one level to serve as a vertical slice, and I was in charge of creating the level blockout. I was faced with a pretty unique challenge with this project because I had never done 3D level design before and I also do not own a VR headset. The process of testing and iterating on the blockout involved actively communicating with other members of the team who did own a VR headset to obtain feedback that I could use to improve the level design.
I really wanted to focus on daunting verticality with the level design, having to climb up and around gigantic objects that really emphasize the inconceivable scale of the game's megastructure setting. At first, I ran into a bit of trouble getting the scaling just right. My level elements were big, but not big enough evoke that daunting feeling in VR that the team and I were going for. To get that effect, I ended up scaling many of the level elements to be nearly 10 times as tall and large! This not only helped achieve what we were going for, it also greatly benefitted the level design and the types of challenges I could put together for the player since many of the scaled-up level elements now had a lot more space and interesting geometry to climb around.