Take the Plunge

Role:
Level Designer

Description:

A 3D sandbox game centered on the verb 'plunge'.

Tools:
Unreal Engine 5, Photoshop

Team Size: 6

Duration:

5 Days

Created on a 6-person team during a 5-day challenge for Sheridan College's 'Design Week' game jam.

My duties included:

Ideating and collaborating with the team to develop a unique and compelling interaction as the foundation of the game.
Creating a rational level layout to guide player flow and offer exploration opportunities.
Incorporating representational level design elements to provide context for player actions.
Theming the level design around the context of action.
Developing rapid prototypes to demonstrate and test design ideas.
Quickly creating level textures and contributing to the stylistic direction to achieve a low-spec turnaround.
Scripting and hosting playtesting sessions to gather valuable insights.
Assessing peer feedback throughout the entire project development process.

Details

Introduction

The prompt for this Design Week challenge was "Underexplored Actions". Faculty encouraged participants to approach their project as a playground that focused on a single underused verb as the main mechanic. As a result, participants were prohibited from settling on common game verbs such as shooting, crafting, collecting, etc.

In order to practice the skills I've been developing by taking on the role of Lead Level Designer.

Our group was very fortunate to have a well-balanced distribution of skills and interests, allowing for each member to settle easily into their self-assigned role. Each member participated in open dialogue, allowing for collaboration, feedback, and support in places where our interests crossed over.

I couldn't have asked for a better team, to be honest.

Design Week was wisely categorized by a daily theme, which helped to gently guide the design process as well as provide an easy and efficient structure to provide a post-mortem.

Let's go over the design process by day…

Day 1 - What's Possible?

The first day was focused around developing a team identity and brainstorming different mechanics.

We immediately shared what our personal strengths and interests were in Game Design (Level Design, Programming, 3D Modelling, etc.) and took to the nearest whiteboard to share ideas for a mechanic.

We then tallied each mechanic based on personal interest and decided on Plumbing by popular vote.

The group enthusiastically began iterating on the mechanic, creating a list of potential creative actions the player can do with a plunger in hand. It was clear to us that we had something the entire group found compelling and achievable for the Design Week challenge.

We eagerly began workshopping how the mechanic would be performed and what different interactions can be achieved. We returned to present this mechanic along with two other potential mechanics, seeking feedback from other groups on their thoughts.

Day 01 - 02b - Leading Concepts + Research&Reference.jpg

Upon receiving the feedback, we were happy to find our group's primary interest affirmed as we received most positive feedback and engagement from the Plunging proposal. With that affirmation, we decided to move forward with Plunging as our game's verb. We had a game!

Day 2 - What's the Action?

Concept Exploration

Teams were tasked with further exploring our game's mechanic by individually proposing and visualizing design ideas, once again allowing for open feedback from other teams.

Rapid Level Concepting

Setting

I knew we were going to be making a house primarily from the context of the verb in question, plunging, and the fact that a lot of our brainstorm fixated around household items, not to mention that there were plenty of free low-poly household item models available online.

I was drawn to the suburban house structure, I rationalized it would be relatively cheap on creative resources to create a single-floor bungalow and fenced-in yard, from here I knew the environment was going to be in the suburbs.

Environment

My mind instantly went to the neighborhood from Edward Scissorhands, this Environment influenced my thematic conceptualization, drawing on the eerie and unsettling depictions of suburbia from the aforementioned film and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun". This was the first time I thought about Soundgarden in a few years.

Theme

This sinister undercurrent resonated with me and some of the other members, and it felt like it resonated with the "player story" which was developing, in which the player would take part in incongruous and bizarre interactions with an otherwise unremarkable object in an otherwise unremarkable environment.

Bouncing from Environment to Theme brought me back to the level's Setting once again.

What was once simply a house to put objects in was now developing it's own personality, palette, and period. I drew upon the reference media's portrayal of pastels to inform the color palette, coding the palette to indicate materiality and use for the artist painting the models and for myself creating the environmental textures.

(While the colour coding helped ground the visual aspects into a unified theme, delineating exact RGB/Hex values for something being built this quickly did not end up being useful.)

Objects

I decided on setting this level in the 80's-90's likely due to the reference material. I justified that the kinds of objects, technology, and furniture of that era had uncomplicated, boxy shapes that would lend themselves well to quick design and a common signifier in shape (VCRS, CRT Televisions, Radios, etc.), this strongly influenced the design concepts for certain objects.

Characters

Our primary artist had already taken to creating character models for the project, and so what I had entered was according to his description, this helped us codify our perceived personalities of the characters. At this time in development, we had planned an adult male who would react to the player's behavior and a child that would patrol a radius in the yard, chasing the player within a certain bounds.

Day 3 - Let Me Do the Action

Level Design Drafting

Spatial Beat Diagram

Having a solid idea for the setting, environment, theme, objects, and characters, I designed a spatial beat diagram plotting the golden path and flow of the level. This became the foundation of the level's design, informing critical item placement and the themes of the level sections.

We were planning on having mission list based on these critical items, and the design of the level was built around this. An early design decision was to have the player start in the bathroom, with a window overlooking the yard (final section) and only able to exit when using the plunger on the door. This plan was to have the bathroom be the teaching section, allowing the player to learn that novel uses of the plunger (breaking down the door) will facilitate level progression.

Doom Engine Mockup

Following the diagram, I designed a mockup of the level design using the doom engine as a base. This was a novel solution to the fact that programmers were still setting up the game in Unreal Engine. This was a quick, cheap, and iterative solution that I was pretty proud of. This allowed me to design the framework of the actual level with a higher level of fidelity than sketching on paper.