Level Design
Workflow
Both Yannick and me planned the overarching level structure of the game and what we wanted to have in each area from different points of view, like Game play, Story or Environmental presentation. I then created flowcharts and wireframes to makes sure we would remember the crucial parts during levelcreation.
After discussing these points and getting a good overview over the project we both started drawing paper blockouts.
After having done these we would switch into Unity and start creating greybox variants of these paper blockouts, and offer feedback to each others work. After we finished the blockouts and ran
some playtesters trough them it was my turn to staff them with Art Assets and add additional Game Logic as well as tweaking the blockout where necessary or assets required it.
The pictures on top have all been drawn/created by me, in parts based on Yannicks work.
Moving Level Parts
We originally wanted a ship located in the central room of the game, which would be moved up and down through leavers located at multiple points in the level.
The Idea here was to craft a non static level structure, which should help make exploration more suprising due to changing already visited pieces of the game world.
Sadly, due to development troubles we never got around to implementing this part of the game. But we did keep the ship as a mayor interest point.
Map Overview
The pictures above show the grey boxes used for all levels, as well as the Staffed Levels with art assets and additional Game Logic already added. The retweaked levels show the small changed I
decided to add after the university project was already finished, further improving the presentation of what was already given and adding a bit more flair.
(Changes are easier to see when inspecting the levels at the bottom of this page.)
Keeping it Organized
After having seen how chaotic a scene will get if not sorted properly while working on our first Student Project Artista, and some decently successful tries to sort the scenes for Fehu - Up is Down in a consistent and working way I wanted to make sure they were organized consistently for Pandemic.
My approach for doing this was to group all objects of the same type together into empty parent objects. (Which have to be positioned at origin without transformations done to them to avoid problems) and divide the objects in this folder further if necessary.
This lead to a clean hierarchical view, with only the lowest level sub folders holding the piles of smaller objects that normally had cluttered the hierarchy.
Final Levels
Handpicked Corners
Below are close ups for some of my favorite corners throughout the game.
