Planning and Concept creation
In this project we were tasked to create a game experience inspired by the game “House of Ashes”, I worked in it as the Level Designer.
My main aim was to create an environment that is oppressive and captures the essence of the original game and do this whilst collaborating with other students in other courses and managing what we need from them.
Production
The main idea for the level was for the environment to become progressively narrower and claustrophobic, we wanted to focus on creating an oppressive environment and use lighting to better guide the player to areas of interest and were to go to progress.
I also worked with asset packs and with my previously knowledge I made sure to blend and alter the 3rd party assets better with the self-made assets, I tried to use various methods to ensure they environment felt like an abandoned excavation.
The main idea for the level was for the environment to become progressively narrower and claustrophobic, as well as be able to guide the player to the correct areas and use lighting correctly to guide the player to the correct areas.
Something I was facing was that the uneven structure of the rock formations made some of the traversal to be a bit clunky, I chose to instead remove the collision of these assets and instead add my own tailor-made environmental collision, this solved the problem.
Blueprints and Code
Final Thoughts
The map design was successful in creating an increasingly suspenseful and claustrophobic experience that guided players to the correct point via my use of lighting whilst making it feel like a realistic depiction of an abandoned excavation site.
I did encounter some issues with lighting as it did not behave as intended sometimes, I should have investigated other ways that I could made lighting effects, something else that could have been added was a simple outside section rather than an abrupt end.
Something that could have been an improvement for the level design could have been to have also played with altitude rather than making the player areas only plain, whoever this could have caused more issues in gameplay so this should first be play tested.
Link to game