Jack Burrup Portfolio
A Man Caged By Beasts
A man caged by beasts is a work in progress level I have been creating as apart of a level and mission design bootcamp with the company Infinity 27.
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The level I have been creating is being created for their indevelopment game 'Samsara'.
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During development of this project, I used applications such as Perforce and Hansoft to keep the project organized.
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As well as this I used the Unreal Engine 3D suite to create the greybox and various Adobe applications in the pre-production of my level.
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During the ideation, pre-production and production stages of my level I was following a brief and a spec that the level had to follow.
Break down
During the first step of the process, I had to go into the map that had been previously created and find a space that my level would fit into.
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As well as this I took specific measurements of my space so I could develop and plan out my level accordingly.
This is the 2D level map I created to give me a bearing on the space of the level as well as placement.
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The level itself has stayed largely similar in size and shape, however certain parts have been modified in their shape as well as mechanic placement.
As apart of this bootcamp, I also had to design a mission and the dialogue for it. This ended up informing my choices on my level design and affect certain iterations later on.
One thing that I found important to plot down first was the varying intensity in my levels critical path to make sure the pacing felt good.
Throughout the project, when developing my grey box level, I had to adhere to specific metrics. Corridors needed to remain a certain size or bigger to allow the player comfortable space to turn their camera, to have combat encounters in.
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I also had to adhere to certain height metrics so the player would always be able to tell when they can climb or drop down from a surface, with or without taking damage.
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Throughout this project I also spent a particularly large amount of time focusing on the shape language and framing of my levels.
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For instance, this image is the players perspective shortly after leaving a tunnel that leads into the level. This is to establish a birds eye view of the levle and its various elements, as well as focus their attention on the camp in the middle of the level, which is important to starting this areas quest.
In this image, the use of pointy objects and a dark, musty green light tells the player that this area is dangerous and to be prepared if they continue down it.
During the critical path of the level, the player encounters this diverging pathway. At this stage, if the player turns right they will be brought out at the focal point they saw at the beginning of the level.
I encourage the player to go in this direction by using brighter lighting and a wider pathway.
When players are faced with a split path, they usually favour the right supporting them to go down the critical path.
This image showcases another example where I frame the players movement to show them key elements of the level. When the player first approaches the camp they are reminded of the shortcut they may have seen at the beginning of the level.
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As they now have access to enable the shortcut the player can choose to do that at their will.
The two main rooms the player has to go into to progress through the intended experience contain enemy ambushes. Just before the room pictured above I lure the player through a warmly lit corridor to give them a false sense of security.
Then shortly after they walk into this room a door behind them closes trapping them in this room with the enemies. The red lighting here is to invoke this feeling of immediate danger that is occurring along with the ambush.
Another thing I made sure to do was show the player places they could explore to progress the quest later on and also provide them ways of getting there without turning around as much, as not to hurt the pacing of the level.
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This mainly came in the form of showing them two different tunnels they would later need to go down while they made their way to the encampment.
As well as this, during my time on the boot camp I had to learn how to work with the Ascent Combat Framework to implement my quest and dialogue.
This involved me setting up dialogue trees within this system as well as blueprinting my own functionality to get my quest to function exactly how I wanted it to.
The list of things I blueprinted were:
- A dialogue action that would trigger doors, trap floors etc.
- A dialogue check to see what 'Avatar' the player was using.
- A function that automatically started the quest and progressed it depending on certain actions undertaken by the player.
Concluding thoughts
My time at the Infinity 27 boot camp has taught me a lot about working in a professional studio like environment, about how to conduct myself as well as how to communicate effectively between a multidisciplinary team.
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As well as this the boot camp taught me a lot of new level design principles that are going to influence any levels I make in the future.
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If I were to do this project again in my own time, I would likely increase the scope as I am now more confident in my skills and am sure I could make an even more interesting level and quest to play and explore.