SOARING STORM (2023)
Level Design | Game Design
Level Design | Game Design
"A peaceful civilization is under attack by a ravenous threat. Channel the power of thunder and lighting, as the mighty Thunderbird, and unleash the storm!"
Game Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Development Time: 7 Weeks
Team Size: 13 People
Genre: Arcade Aerial-Combat
My Work
I had the honor to be working on an insanely fun project as the project's Level Designer for 7 weeks. However, I was also able to work a lot with Onboarding, JIRA & the GDD
LD Process
From what I've found after having worked on multiple group projects, the easiest and most fun way of working with Level Design is by doing it iteratively. Get something on paper, no matter how "bad" it might be, and then iterate upon it afterward. Quickly getting something done rather than nothing is a major priority to me.
Pre Production
For me, everything starts on paper. I love doodling concepts before doing pretty much anything thing else. These sketches are obviously not meant to represent the final work. No, they are mainly just meant for me to get a spark of creativity.
After having gotten myself excited about the work, and having drawn some conceptual sketches, I immediately went onto getting some details about the project known.
Info Gathering
This process looks very different for each project, but what it essentially is, is me asking myself questions about the project and level. I do this because answering questions is psychologically easier than just coming up with ideas out of nowhere.
For Soaring Storm, an aerial arena shooter game with only one main level. Well, I only needed a framework that I could use while experimenting with what is most fun, therefore the details might seem a bit too general:
Level Sketch
After I had gathered the information needed as well as gaining plenty of excitement and passion for the work ahead. It was then time to jump over into actually creating the "real" sketch of the level!
As always, I started by making something simple on paper. Mostly playing around with shape language, and prototyping in my head what could flow well.
Usually, well, pretty much always I have a flowchart in my LDD. This time I almost didn't really have that. However, what I had in exchange was what you are seeing right now, as well as some more "text based" flow charting a bit further down.
Dev Playground
I then took that early sketch and actually headed into the engine. This was around the same time when our Technical Designer had already made a prototype character controller, and therefore I wanted him to have a environment he could fly around in as quickly as possible.
<-- This level was then extensively used by a lot of members in our team.
Actual Sketch
I then quickly started creating the "real" sketch. However, because the game is so incredibly vertical and well... is a flying game. I didn't really know how to properly sketch out the level. I came up with this solution: -->
A solution which I think in the end helped me out quite a lot, but I also have to say that it's a bit too much, and the final level looks a lot more similar to the first rough sketch than what I drew up as the "real sketch"
Continued Journey
This then began my journey of trying to create the perfect level for this game. An insanely intense and fun process that left me in the end with one of the coolest feelings I think I've ever felt. Working on this felt like I was working on an actual, commercial product and since this also was my first project where I was specialized in basically just Level Design, I couldn't help but smile all the way from beginning to end.
Such a fun project, such an amazing team.
For the rest of this page please look through my different iterations directly from my LDD for Soaring Storm.
This was by far the longest Game Project I've worked on. Which gave me the opportunity to document my progress much more thoroughly than previous projects. However, just a heads up before you look at my LDD:
*This is not really the way I write LDD's now. So keep that in mind. Again, this was my first group project as a "specialized" Level Designer.*
