ANGEL HACHE
GAME DESIGNER
A level design with a lot of interconnections and shortcuts to explore a mysterious nightmare world. Specially designed to be explored in various ways using different backtracking mechanics.
The level design of Shard of Hope was developed during the Game Design Master's Degree at U-tad.
LEVEL DESIGN: METROIDVANIA
layout
My process
Layout
Planificate situations and encounters creating a progression for the player. Every part of the level should serve a specific mechanic.
Blocking
The moment to visualize all together and do some tests. This is an important phase of the process because it's possible to play and you will get an invaluable feedback.
Iterate
Iterate and do some improvements trying to adapt the level to a specific learning curve . It's important to use the all the feedback you can get.
The goal is make a fun experience.
I started creating some situations exploring the mechanics of the game: dashes, walljumps, precisse jumps, combat, etc.
During this iterations, my teammates and I had a more precisse idea about how to build the nightmares's world of Shards of Hope. It also allowed us to know more about the limitations and dynamics of the game mechanics.
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The first layout of the tutorial zone was an approach to use all the mechanics in different situations increasing the difficulty.
During the feedback sesisons I realized that the level was not engaging for the player because the pathing was not high enough.
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To fix this problem, we created a simple and short tutorial for the first zone and putting the production focus on the main level.
During this phase, I was doing a quick blockout at the same time to iterate the layouts more effectively.
The level was divided in three sections. I work on two of them: the initial zone and the final chambers. With the help of another teammate, we improved the connections and implemented better zones where the player will need to do backtracking.
The final layout of the level (minus the tutorial zone)
Finally, I did a revision of the level correcting some situations in game with the feedback of all team.
With the level structured, I managed and placed the save points (fountain in red) and all the economy shards (pickable in yellow).
The objective was to show the player rewards in close challenges and some beyond, generating the idea of the backtracking that we will need after.
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blockout
I started creating a basic blocking. It evolved with the firsts layouts. Also I helped a bit doing some world building in order to support art department giving them some ideas. As stated earlier, the first blocking was very boring because of the pathing.
Doing this, the team realized that the approach of the tutorial was not the best so we focused on a new layout and blocking. It was an iterative process.
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During this phase, the designers work together with the art team "dressing" the level.
My responsability was to check the world building with various artists and clean the collisions.
The main objective was to make sure the player knew how to advance. Also, reducing the collisions improved the game performance.
Also, an important process was to split the level in different layers in order to save memory usage using level streaming.
I created one layer for the "white area" which is the tutorial and 3 layers for the main level: "the red zone".
Thanks to this implementation, different areas could load and others could unload during gameplay enhancing memory usage. The performance of the game increased.
We added some trigger boxes to fix the camera in some locations. We also added UI events which allowed to name the different zones of the map.
All of which improved the gamefeel.
implementation
Finally, working with the art department and using the "definitive layout" we could implement a map system in order to help the players to located themselves. It also gives some perspective about the connections and the organization of the different zones and how to reach the save points easily. To discover a new zone, the player must visit it first, generating more curiosity.
