Encounter Design, Level Design, and QA

Genre: Action Platformer

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Use your elemental fists to defeat Pingleton's robot army and save the island.

My Contributions:

Encounter design and general level design contribution to second level.
Overhauled majority of final level's combat and traversal encounters.
Spec sheets for proposed additions.
- Includes new swarmer enemy and lava behavior that was reused for the ether lake in Level 2.
Replaced Houdini generated terrain in Level 1 with static mesh assets.
QA and OOB fixes during Release Canidates 2 and 3.

I came onto the project a year into development. They reached out to me based on my portfolio, and brought me on as an encounter design specialist.

I had two main jobs.

Plan out encounters for the new level and iterate on those.
Iterate on existing traversal and combat encounters.

Additionally, to prevent it from being cut, I overhauled the majority of the final level's encounters.

The Ether Level - Encounter Design Planning

Preproduction Planning

I went to discuss with our level design lead how the new level was going to look, and proposed some adjustments to create better vistas, but besides that it looked very nice!

They sent this top-down sketch, I looked over it and thought about what it might look like from the player's perspective.

Originally, this level served to introduce ranged enemies. However, we decided to tutorialize ranged enemies in the first level, and I wrote up the spec sheet for swarming enemies, to make use of the fire attack's AOE damage.

While other teammates were whiteboxing and feeling out the space, I took the general map and created a document listing out proposals for potential encounters, including segments of expansion and evolution.

Above: Screenshot from my planning doc, listing evolution concepts to pick from

The Water Level - Tutorialization and Cross-Disiplinary Work

Collaboration with User Research

This first section of tutorialization required several reworks. The original version of the level didn't have mandatory punching tutorialization, and the prechange version let the player circumnavigate it and blocked the view of the player goal. So, I pitched the change depicted here, and implemented it.

Most of the other iterations were slight movements and reorientation of the rocks to make bypassing the dash-jump tutorial impossible.

Collaboration with Environment

In it's original form, the level was made out of Unreal's Cube Grid, then Houdini generated more realistic looking terrain. Unfortunately, the polygon count would lag out the game. So, environment made rock assets, and I replaced all the terrain in the water level with static meshes.

Also, as I went through this process, I would work with environment to add rooms for additional collectables.

Top: Before

Bottom: After

The Fire Level - Complete Overhaul

Initial Proposition

The game had a longer runtime than planned. Between that, and the fire level not meeting the standards of the rest of the project, the initial plan was to cut it from the project. This would be a third of the games content. I proposed that, since I was brought on as encounter design, and the encounters were the part that was lacking, I could go in and overhaul the encounters.

After some delebration, I found that the first half of the level was mostly fine. We moved a story beat from this level to a past level, so that arena needed replaced, but otherwise it's fine.

The second half of the level lacked content variety, which is why the plan was to cut the level. So, as an encounter design specialist, I overhauled that half of the level.

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