Level design

The subject of this post is level design and in fact I'm quite happy that I'm writing it now instead of in the first term as I was supposed to do. It may sound strange, but the reason behind that is quite simple: in the second term I had the opportunity to work on a group project that was to design and create a game level. Therefore now I've got some experience to which I can relate in this post. So below I'll describe some stages that we went through, things that we had to consider and problems that have occurred along the way of creation of this level.  

The brief was to create a gothic-themed level, so the first (and as I've already said in one of the previous posts - one of the most important) step was research. We wanted to make sure that whatever we would create could be easily recognized as gothic related. Beside of historical and architectural aspects, we looked for examples of gothic themes in literature, film and other video games. After considering different types of gothic environments we could create, we decided to go with manor house. 

Having decided on that we could start doing some initial concepts. Below you can see some created by me.

 

We all agreed that one of the level aspects we wanted to emphasize was mood. So even though we didn't have final concepts ready we were playing with lighting and weather effects like rain and fog in cryengine.   

Just like it would be done in production of real game level we started 3d work with simple level block-out in engine. We decided to build our manor with modular pieces so creating this block-out helped us to estimate how big the pieces needed to be. It  also helped us to decide on overall size of the level and placement of specific elements. I believe that this was the most important step level design-wise as here we decided what path we wanted the player to walk through. This decision has big impact on playability of our level.

Although, at this step, one of the biggest problems we encountered during the production have occurred. We had pretty hard time trying to match what we had planned in our minds for the interior and for the exterior of the building. The interior simply didn't fit inside the exterior's shell. So we had to rearrange some things. Each one of us drew his idea for how we could fix that. This is my sketch:

After we had whole level planned out we could start working on proper assets to swap with placeholder blocks. At this stage we only had to make sure that the level looked nice as all level-design problems were already sorted. Here's some examples of assets created by me:

And here you can see our level fly-through. It's not completely finished yet, we still need to create some more assets to populate it but I guess it's finished enough to show it. Enjoy :)