(Coming Soon - Alpha Phase)
AAA third-person ARPG based on ancient Hindu epics
Sr. Level & Environment Designer | Third Eye Studios
Level Design Process
As my team's Sr. Level Designer, I spent the first month of production working with the team to establish Rudra's narrative, gameplay loop, mechanic systems, and flow.
Based on our initial ideation and player feedback, I created the flow chart you see to the right. This flow breaks down the player journey from start to finish in order to establish: 1. a solid vision for individual-level flow charts, 2. violent and non-violent encounters,
3. the right feel we want our players to have while playing Rudra.
Because we wanted to establish early a well-polished combat experience, we chose to lead production with the creation of the 2nd Yuga (1 of 4 time periods in this Epic) in order to give our combat encounters as much playtime as possible.
The 2nd Yuga, we decided, would be an introduction to encounter types, and would give the player an opportunity to practice their newly learned mechanics in combat encounters ranging from easy to difficult. We also wanted to give players a short break in between combat encounters to interact with their environment, establish new narrative, and grant special skills or stat boosts in exchange for completing various challenges.
In accordance with the narrative that players are in this world to heal it, I designed each phase of this Yuga to include a healing and a combat encounter. Each healing challenge a player completes will grant them an additional skill or stat boost that the player may then practice with on a small enemy type before entering into battle with larger and more numerous enemy types, as shown in the grey boxing on the right.
The pink you see is representative of a river that is blocked at certain points throughout the level, and if unblocked by the player, flows throughout the map granting the above-mentioned gifts and representing the unblocking of our hero's Chakra. In order for the hero to challenge and defeat the final boss and enemies along his path, he must unblock his whole Chakra to unlock his full potential and spirituality.
With our environment blocked out and thoroughly tested for playability and enjoyable gameplay, I set out to design our mission encounters which included creating the visual scripting (blueprints in UE5) for the "unblocking" of our river Chakra, audio cues, trigger boxes for pop-up text and encounter instructions.
Having just finished up work on Hogwarts Legacy, this wasn't too difficult of a challenge and I'm looking forward to creating additional player interactables throughout the level in our next phase of work.
With regard to the development of our environment, I'll also be taking on a larger role in environment creation in order to take work off of my artists' plates and allow them more time to polish environment art pieces to the AAA level we've set out to create.
I'm currently in the process of creating an environment art bible for our teams to reference in order to establish an enchanting and immersive experience for players to enjoy. Each Yuga will have a continuously deteriorating theme to it, and I have taken on the task to create a core list of assets that can be recolored and reused in various environment designs in order to limit the amount of work for our artists.
Be sure to check back in May when Rudra is complete for additional information and to play our completed game!