Undergraduate Level Design

For my undergrad capstone game, me and my team worked on a relatively 'closed' open world setting. The player is a shoplifter infiltrating a huge shopping mall. There are nine levels in the game, and they all take place in the same big open level, but the layout changes within each level to provide an effectively unique experience. For example, certain doors are completely locked during some levels, while they're open in others. Early in the game, huge sections of the map are closed off, so the player doesn't have as much ground to cover. Later on, it opens up, granting great agency to plan a route or scramble through many rooms to escape.

This whole thing ended up being a massive level design exercise. 

In my mind, this was a great way to get a lot of mileage out of one larger level, and since the world was composed of various themed shops, it would be possible for each of our level designers to build levels independently and later drop them into the full world. Of course, in practice, it was a huge amount of work for everyone, including the artists, to make and arrange the game assets. Still, it did allow us a huge amount of game content and a degree of player freedom that I'm still proud of. 

Although we wanted the player to have a lot of freedom in how they explore the game world, its still imperative to understand what the goals of the game are. To help remedy players getting lost without adding an entire mini-map system, we 'animated' a cutscene to cut from camera to camera in the mall, starting with a view of the target item and ending with a view of the player. It's a bit like breadcrumbing a path for the player to take, IF they want to take it.

Despite how much work it was to make 3D assets and put together the physical game world, the impossible-to-surpass hurdle ended up being the lighting. We used ProBuilder to make our game, and that was instrumental in being able to assemble all this level geometry, but it did not play nice with Unity's lighting system. At the end of the project we ended up with bugs with the official Unity approved solution being "restart Unity five times and pray." Needless to say, I now prefer Unreal Engine. 

One thing that worked great was theming the different stores based on their location. None of our playtesters had any trouble navigating the world after running through it once. When we designed the overall map, my original vision was that each store would have it's own theme. The art department quickly realized that was far too much work, so we scoped down and instead themed three corners of the map, and reused that theme for each of the stores in that area. This gave each side of the map its own distinct feeling- combining that with a few unique props and varying room shape, every single room in the mall feels distinct. 

This here was the first chunk of the map we made, for vertical slice. It ended up being less than 10% of the game world. 

Here's the world map for reference- and that's just one floor!