The House (2023)
Level Design | Game Design
Level Design | Game Design
"The year is 1974. You are a lone operative looking for your sergeant, who've gone missing after encountering the mysterious entity known only as: "The House"."
Game Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Development Time: 2 Weeks
Team Size: 2 People
Genre: Liminal Survival-Horror
My Work
This is the first time I've tackled working on such a big project without a team. Therefore, our roles were obviously very fluid, but my main focus was Level Design, General Blueprint Programming and Technical Art!
LD Process
For me, the biggest worry during this project were: "How do I pump out as much content as possible without overworking myself, making bland levels or killing the passion I have for the game?"
I might seem a bit obvious stating it out loud, but still, how I tackled this worry is with something I preach about a lot when it comes to Level Design.
I enjoy working iteratively. Not being too scared of just making anything, even if it's objectively bad, just so I can then improve upon it. Because at least for me, I find it so much easier to point out things I can improve upon rather than making everything perfect the first time ;)
Pre Production
I began, as always, with pen and paper. When we as a team had decided on what type of game we wanted to make, and after agreeing on that, I should make a level set in a dreadful house. I quickly got excited. I began drawing up just concepts inspired by the many weird houses I've encountered after having lived in the Swedish outskirts all my life.
I also gathered a lot of images from here and there that I could use as reference. The main style the game was aiming for was liminal space and there were a lot to take from.
Information Gathering
When I had finished conceptualizing the "vibes" I then started deciding on some level details. How I do this is by asking myself questions about what the level is supposed to be. For example:
"What can the player do?" "How would you translate them into - clear to understand mechanics?" "What makes them interesting?"
By answering these, I am basically just explaining to myself how good this game could potentially be and how fun it will be to work on, while I simultaneously make sure I am making a level that fits the gameplay decided by my Gameplay Designer: Linus Lindblad.
Because, well, this might sound a bit cheesy, but I see a Level Designer's main task as: Make everyone else's work shine as bright as they possibly can. As a Level Designer, I get to be directly involved in a lot of different departments works. Therefore. I need to know what I'm working with, so I can make their work look as good as they've made it.
This is what it might look like:
Flowchart
The best thing about having finished all the prep work I've showcased is that the flow charting is incredibly easy to make afterward.
I usually start writing my flowchart in Notepad, as text, then I make the flowchart separately in a different software. I tried using OneNote this time, which I didn't feel worked that well. So, I later switched to Visio.
Level Sketch
When I started with the actual Level Sketch, I was scared that, with the very small amount of time we had, I wouldn't be able to piece together the entire level in time.
How I solved this was by using one of those buzzwords constantly being thrown around: Modularity.
Though, not the type of modularity where I just duplicate content. No more, the type of modularity where each room is its own hand designed "Lego block". Blocks you can easily put together. This made it so that when I was putting it all together it was incredibly easy, not time-consuming, but most importantly... I could with ease rearrange the layout of the level without messing up the functionality of the level.
One more helpful technique I used during this project was that when it was time for blocking out the level, I took the scale accurate sketch, imported it into Unreal Engine and added it into the scene as a sprite.
This made it so incredibly easy to finish the outlines of the level. Of course, there were a lot of tweaks that still needed to be made, but overall it saved me so much time.
