Untitled Shooter

Another one of my favorite classes, this time Level Design I, had this as our final project. While the others have been fairly simple in terms of paperwork, this one required we go through the steps of a level - pre production, sandbox, whitebox, then the final level itself.

Pre-production

Sandbox

Whitebox

Final Level

Pre-production

Level design I was an interesting class where we took some of the unity minigames that already existed, and we were to make a level out of one of these minigames. This project happened to land on the shooter minigame. I am not an FPS player, so my knowledge of level design in that area was a bit… sparse. The only real familiarity I had with the genre were games like Portal, Fallout, and Valkyria, which all had an element of puzzle solving and strategy in them. This got me thinking I didn’t need to approach it as an FPS - I should approach it as a strategy game. With that in mind, I set out creating this papermap. Which went through some aggressive changes.

Sandbox

This is where I went through possibilities on how I can make things interesting. I don’t remember what I was playing at the time, but I believe it was something where I could manipulate the environment to make a level that was more favorable for me. This got me thinking how I could reproduce that on this level, and my solution was to use trees and bushes as a barrier. The player, if I did the coding right, would be able to drop the bushes to the next layer, and shoot the trees to take them through multiple layers. Granted, this turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected, but I had a goal in mind. With that, I got whiteboxing.

Whitebox

I made the level, played through it, and realized I had a not really functional level. What looked good on paper didn’t exactly pan out to be what I wanted in practice. So I changed it, keeping what I could salvage. The specific criticism I think I got was that I didn’t teach the player how to drop the trees and bushes (or even that they could), so I put a little barrier that involved the player stepping on some switches in the beginning of the level to progress. I also aggressively changed the floor plans to become more of what they are in the final video, omitting a floor but expanding the floors as well as adding in a little secret to those who figured out using the bushes.

Final Level

I hadn’t taken modeling and texturing at this point, so I didn’t know anything about either, which led to some very very simple material modeling in unity, which turned out to work fine enough. Below is the final level.

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