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Speed LD-"The Village"
Basic Infos:
- 9 people team
- Lenght: 2 months (Jan-Feb 2023)
- Role: Level Designer
- Task: Design area 1 (The City)
- Additional Tasks: blockout tutorial area and enrichment, Landscape sculpting
- Engine: UE5.1
Team managment and organisation
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One of our third year school projects consisted in creating a short open world game with a restrained map.
I joined a 9 people team; It was the first time that I've worked in a large group and it was quite a challenge: we had a lot of organisation problems and we struggled to share information on the development between each others
Concept
The peculiar choice of using a dog as a main character leaded me an the other level designers to face a different approach especially with metrics and enclosures
Work Experience
First Layout
Final Blockout
The team was split in different groups depending on the individual exigencies of each member. I decided to work as a level designer to extend my experience and improve my skills.
The task that was assigned to my group was to work on the design of one of the two main areas of the map: "The City"
At first we dedicated some time to research references and the creation of common guidelines (to uniform all the different areas as much as possible), then we created an LDD document and a first layout
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The first thing that we noticed as we approached the blockout was that we had to pay a strong attention to the metrics, since the "Dog Character" had smaller size than the unreal basic character, but the run speed was pretty high
Speaking about problems of the first layout the main issue was the lack of high ground: the player had access to high ground just once (near the landmark area).
So we decided to rework all the map adding different raised areas and an explorable building to variate the environment
The result of our work is an area accessible from two different paths.
The level design leads the player to the central hub and from there to all the side areas of the map
When the player finishes the first part of the gameplay has access to the second one (inside the building) and then he can collect the final objective (located on the high part of the map). From there the player's view is directed to the second main area
