Cielo

Level Designer

Technical Designer

Project manager

Platform: PC

Engine: Unity

Team Size: 6

Duration: 12 weeks

Sheridan Capstone project for the post graduate Game Level Design, developed completely remotely

Cielo merges classic arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament with the damage mechanic of Smash Brothers. Creating a networking 3vs3 fast-paced game where players use guns rather than melee attacks to push their opponents out of the arena and kill them. Players have air abilities to return to the arena and the more damage they take the farther bullets push them off the platforms.

Objective:

Merge classic arena shooters like Unreal Tournament with Smash Brothers
Develop a Network Multiplayer Arena Game
Create a modular pieces pipeline for agile Level Design

My Responsibilities:

Leading scrums every day
Maintaining Hack n Plan
Documentation (GDD, LDD)
Establishing art modularity guidelines
Level Design tools design and debugging
Coding character movement, weapons and bullet collision
Assembling and coding UI
Balancing character movement and weapons
Particle effects
Lighting
Optimization
Implementing quality settings systems to reach a broad spectrum of machines

Metrics Gym

I created a level to help...

Define World metrics
Fine tune character movement values
Fine tune weapons
Define rules for the artist to create assets
I also created rulers for each type of movement so that they could be used while creating levels to maintain consistency

Metrics gym board where all balance were being tracked

Space to balance movement, abilities and weapons

Measure and adjust dash distance

Adjust jump height

Get a feel for ground moving metrics

Measure and adjust jump, double jump and jetpack distance

Test weapon knockback force on dummies

Test weapons by getting shot by them

Rulers made from gym results to measure jumps and spaces while creating levels

Modularity

To control the art pieces flow into the engine I created a scene to..

Have all art pieces in one place
Easily control prefabs
Test Lighting
Create collision

Scene to keep track of pieces and easily modify prefabs

Level Design Tools

To more easily create levels, decorate them and iterate, I worked closely with the programmer to create some tools...

Art piece window organized by category to easily view and instantiate art pieces in level
Replace object or rename
Delete duplicated objects if they share the same position
Snap selected objects to floor
Randomly rotate or scale selected objects within a defined threshold (used for grass and vegetation)

External tools used

Brush paint prefabs (for grass and details)
Mesh bake objects

Level editor to place modular pieces

Replace Objects, Rotate or Scale, Displace Objects and Remove duplicates

Level Design

Process:

Paper Diagrams
Greyboxing level
Testing session
Iterate with test results in mind
First Art Pass
Testing sessions
Second Art Pass
Optimization
Lighting

Challenges:

Creating levels that could be played in different game modes (team deathmatch, capture the flag)
Creating choke points in a game where you can fly anywhere,
- To do this we created vertical choke points that can only be accessed by jump pads
- We also used static assets (such as trees and pillars) to cut lines of sight
- Without creating walls that could be exploited to stop a player from being knocked out of the arena.
Using landmarks to determine bases and orient players in symmetric arenas
Carefully defining item placements to encourage encounters and interesting gameplay