Blade Runner: Fugitive
Discover the whereabouts and hunt a dangerous fugitive through their underground hideout in this narrative driven proof of concept.
Team / Duration: 3 / 7 Weeks
Genre: 3rd Person Action Stealth Shooter
Focus: Mechanics & level design
Role: Game & Level Designer
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Purpose: University MA Project (2022) - Client Brief
Software Used: UE4, Adobe illustrator, Github (Source Control), Microsoft Office
The Brief
Blade Runner: Fugitive was a 3-person team university project created using Unreal Engine. This was another client project (Fabrik Games), this time they wanted a more linear focused experience. The team decided to use this chance to focus on portfolio pieces that they could show off their skills with, for me it was level design and level mechanics.
The assignment, given by Fabrik Games, was to create an artefact that uses one from a list of 7 narrative expositions.
The chosen prompt had to then be combined with an existing IP, which can then be “reimagined” for a PC game using a controller for its control scheme.
"The type of game that you are required to design is based on one of the narrative prompts that were given above. So, you need to take an intellectual property, reimagine it using one of the narrative prompts above and then create a PC game that uses an Xbox controller based on the mashup of IP and narrative prompt."
Billboards for clarity
The use of billboards in blueprints helped when it came to identifying placed trigger boxes and modular blueprints within the level. So I created some custom images for this specific purpose.
Blueprints
Although we used the ALS v4 from UE4 marketplace as a base, additional blueprints were needed. These included the level mechanics like doors and switches & extra player mechanics, such as health and shooting functionality.
All blueprints were designed with functionality & modularity in mind, this was so they could be dropped into any part of any level and be customised to suit the specific purpose through variables as opposed to needing multiple variations of essentially the same blueprint for each use case.
