SECTOR 583

Your ship has crash landed on an unknown planet that is infected with hostile entities, do you have what it takes to fight through the hordes and find a way home?

Team / Duration: Solo / 7 Weeks
Genre: FPS, Horde, Survival
Focus: Mechanics & level design
Role: Game & Level Designer

Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Purpose: University BSc Project (2021) - Client Brief

Software Used: UE4

PLAY: ITCH.IO

The Concept

The Brief

Thanks to the kind developers at Fabrik Games, we had a client to work for. They provided a brief and the university provided the projects requirements.

Fabrik's brief was to create a collection of mechanics or a level based around a certain style of games; these game being PVE co-op games against insurmountable odds in the same vein of:

Left 4 Dead 1 & 2
Warhammer: Vermintide 1 & 2
Back for Blood (Alpha)

As an additional element, an additional goal was for the product to be based around "twinned/parallel worlds" (Interpretation was up to us).

Fun with maps

Mechanics ready, the next step was to create the map for the overall level. As i already knew the story for the game from the initial concept, making the levels objectives fit within the overall narrative made a lot of sense. The commercial cruiser would be home to the first level and the aim of the level is for the player to fight through enemies to the generator where they must reroute the power to the living quarters where the survivors have taken shelter after their unfortunate crash.

On creating the draft map I was most happy with, I separated it into sections and began to think of how each area would play out, including what the player would see when they entered the room and how would they be directed through.

I also illustrated the entrances and exits in each room to mark the players critical path throughout the level.

I wanted to leave enough room off the main path for the possible inclusions of extra areas for collectibles and exploring for use if this were to be used in a fully-playable polished game.

These extra pathways, would also be used to avoid the player being overwhelmed with enemies.

I later changed the ending section to be an open room with the generators to better fit the objective of the level.

Ensuring FUN

Along with the technical aspects, my main goal when creating my level was to entertain the player. The level needed to be enjoyable.

I decided to create all the assets myself to not take away from this, I didnt want the focus to be on highly polished assets that I had downloaded from the asset store, I wanted the focus on the level and its functionality.

I feel like I achieved this, the use of my own assets added a certain charm to the game and playtesters gave me the laughs that I wanted (thankfully at the right moments, they werent just laughing at my work) and even though better gameplay and more refined assets & spaces would add to the project, ultimately I found the final product to be a success.

I decided to create a level as this has the added benefit of not only showing off my level design skills, but also, I could create the mechanics aswell to let the player traverse any obstacle I create if I wished.

As soon as I read the brief, my mind went to one of my favourite games Warframe; a space shooter with lots of movement focusing on fun engaging gameplay. However due to my lack of animation and combat design I decided to stick with a basic FPS character and design the mechanics from this perspective. After some consideration I thought of my concept:

In the distant future, warp gate technology was created to allow for rapidly expedited travel between off-world colonies, however when one of the warp gates malfunctions and sends a commercial cruiser to an unknown sector of space, the survivors must fight against a terrifying new threat. This unknown sector is infected with a large parasitic entity that corrupts whoever it infects. The concept envisions a 4-player co-op experience.

The levels mainly consisting of a singular start and end point; with gameplay sections (tasks & puzzles) set up at certain points to act as gates for the players progression, in which the players must use observation, character skills or brute force to overcome.

The puzzles will include the co-op aspects of the gameplay as clues will have to be found and communicated to the team to proceed through the puzzles, additionally the puzzles will have to be completed during combat sections, therefore the team will need to divide tasks in order to complete the puzzles without the team dying to the horrors lurking around them.

Mechanics

With a plan ready, I began prototyping the mechanics. A wave spawner was implemented aswell as 2 types of enemies; 1 that could be placed manually in the level then activates on sight of the player and 1 that spawns when the player enters a trigger box then automatically paths to the player using a nav mesh. I used the basic first person character template in UE4 to begin with and adapted them to fit more with the type of gunplay I wanted when I was performing my research. To do this I increased the movement speed and reduced the gravity value for the main character to achieve a quicker, more 'floaty' feel to movement.

I also added a fully automatic feature to the weapon aswell as a slow bullet that has a small cooldown. This slow bullet was one of the abilities I thought to include to the game as part of a class upgrade, other abilities were a shield dome that protects from ranged attacks, a wall hook that allows the player to cling on walls to access new paths and explosives.