Get The Item

A week or so ago Kevin gave us an LDD to follow loosely as grounds for a portfolio piece. For now, I'm putting a cap in it, but I'll talk about the process now. This entire level from start to finish took me about 10 hours. 

I didn't do very much planning for this project before I got into engine, since Kevin Cheng gave us an LDD to start from anyways. The player starts at a beach and must infiltrate a base to retrieve a crown from a boss character, then escape back to another beach. There's a lot of room Kevin made for us, but we weren't required to use all (or any) of 'em. It was originally designed as infiltrating a castle, but I chose to switch the theme so the player infiltrated a pirate base instead. Why? Well, I guess I just like pirates more than knights. 

I started with the beach where the player spawns and built the level out from there. The actual first thing I did was get the skybox moody and atmospheric. I knew from the get-go I wanted stealth to be an option, at least somewhat, so a darker lighting would fit. I used an older BP_sky_sphere from the depths of UE5, which took care of the sky, stars, and clouds for me. Then, the moon itself is just a sphere I threw way out into the distance. Last thing I added for mood was the ocean water, taken from a pre-made UE5 addon without any effort or changed on my part! I know a whitebox doesn't need to be particularly aesthetically pleasing, but these additions took very little time, and atmosphere is something I care about a lot, so I wanted to try and capture it, even just a bit. 

Next I messed around with a landscape. The UE5 landscape tool is fantastic. If you ever feel like your mountains are too 'gloopy', just make sure you're changing your brush size and tool strength often, and don't over-rely on the smooth tool. 50-100 point sculpt tool is what I used most often for the mountains. The flatten tool and the ramp tool are favorites too- keeping the area the player is meant to walk across flat seems like a no-brainer, and helps keep the boundaries clear. The flatten and ramp tools help make this easy. 

After I made a rough landscape to start, I modelled a boat, a palm tree, and a boulder in Blender. These are things I could have modelled in Unreal, but it probably would have taken me 15 minutes instead of 2. Either way would have been fine, especially since it's just a whitebox, so I just went with the faster option.

All this setup took about one hour. This was the result at that point:

From there I just carved out a path step by step, looking for opportunities to add player agency where I could. Sadly, the gameplay pack I used was pretty buggy and not the most robust. Having an inconsistent player character feels like poison for actually designing a level with intention. Next time I think I'll make my own gameplay, Blueprints are easy enough. Still, there were some things I did in response to the gameplay.

The close combat character is able to (assuming it doesn't randomly break!) backstab enemies if you sneak up behind 'em. The obvious way to apply this is to allow different routes for the player if they want to be more sneaky. It's a pretty simple setup, where a sneaky path often takes a bit longer, but allows the player to skip or get an advantage in combat. Besides that, the AI was pretty braindead, so there wasn't too much room to actually balance the game, which is sad! 

My golden path is pretty straight forward. I think when I couldn't do much with the AI I just resigned myself to focusing more on the aesthetics and conveyance. As it is, I feel the level is pretty natural to navigate, even the 'secret routes' I included. For example, the first sneak route has a ton of pointers towards it, but my favorite is the lip in the cliff. To me, it just looks inviting!

Anyways, even though I think the game flow in this level is pretty good, the aesthetics are definitely the focus. Probably that's not a good idea. Next time I'll make my own game. 

Here's a few other angles of the island. That is all!