Zhenghao Chu

Trailer

Level Design Documents

Overview of the Level Map

Goals

The design goals are mainly focused on building up great ambush design and try to find and apply several modifier which influence the experience brought by the ambush.

• Make great ambush design referring to various successful ambush design examples, try to apply their patterns in the Dying Light.

• Try to control the difficulty of the ambush by several modifiers, then prove its feasibility by playtests.

Design

1.  Refer, conclude and apply different elements for ambush design:

I have researched and analyzed about multiple classical ambush situation in different game, including Dark Soul series, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, etc. With these references, I try to conclude the core elements for making the ambush situation impressive.

I have read articles related to military tactics about ambush and the analyzation so to clarify the definition of the ambush at very first:

·         A well-set kill zone, with efficient restriction for the player’s movement.

·         Enemy/Barricades which prevents the player from leaving the kill zone easily.

·         Some enemy tend to move around fast and frequently to distract the player, and then provide chance for the other enemy to attack by surprise.

Meanwhile, I also research a lot about the modifiers that may influence the combat. In the combat, player is making plans/decisions every second, and there are three core parameters which player considers the most:

·         Evaluate the distance: Enemy spawn position.

·         Evaluate the time:  The timing and the sequence for the enemy generation. 

·         Cleverness and anticipation: Enemy combination (different type of enemy work as a team) 

By modifying these parameters, I could change the difficulty through the time, which directly influence the ambush situation's efficiency.

The level is separated to four areas for differentiation, including:

·           Slums section: Focusing on building up restricted view and narrow space for player’s movement, so to hide enemy away from the player’s view and provide tricky position for the enemy to spawn.

·           Roofs section: Focusing on building up various vertical movements with restricted space on different platforms, so to add more pressure when fighting the large quantity enemy.

·           Residential section: Focusing on reusing of space and building up different kill zones with enemy’s distraction from multiple direction. Try to separate the space in a reasonable way while setting up kill zones naturally.

·           Shopping center section: Focusing on the no vertical space design with challenging combat about boss chasing experience. Trying to figure out the reasonable ambush design under the high-pressure level.

2.  Prove the modifiers' feasibility by playtests

I need a way to prove that the modifiers that I choose is actually influence the combat in the way I thought it would be, so I choose to use the tension level to analyze the playtester's reaction and impression about the ambush.

The reason I choose the tension is because the impression that the ambush brought to the players always related to the high-tension elements(jump-scare, being surrounded by huge quantity of enemy, hidden enemy rushes towards the player etc.) So I want to analyze how do the different modifiers influence the player's tension level, therefore I can figure out how efficient each modifier is.

3. The result of this research

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Additional Screenshots

Post Mortem

What went well:

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What went wrong:

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