FM HPE 102.4
Third Person Narrative Adventure
Embark on a perilous journey through a frozen wasteland and uncover the chilling echoes of those that tried before...
Project Overview
The Team:
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3 Level Designers
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4 Game Artists
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3 Animators
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1 Technical Artist
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6 Game Programmers
Production Time:
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15 weeks half-time.
Engine:
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Unreal Engine as a level editor
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Feather Engine, made by the team
Reference Game:
My Contributions:
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Level design ownership of level 3.
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Prototyping mechanics in Unreal.
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Scripting in Feather Engine.
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Level art.
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Member in taskforces such as gameplay, pipeline, metrics, visual scripting and more.
Key Highlights
Early level concept
I had the opportunity to create the last level of the game, and since the levels before this was more open I wanted to create a more enclosed area with the feeling of traversing hard and rocky terrain.
The early concepts was to large after playtesting, since the player mostly explores and listens to audio tapes the distance was to far between them with nothing to do.
Iteration and narrative metrics
With those issues identified I started shrinking the map and time how long it would take the player to go from the start and end. But something I had to consider as well, as I like to call it, was the narrative metrics. Because in the game you are listening to audio tapes from a previous expedition.
Something I dislike in games is that when you encounter audio logs to frequent and would then be able to miss the current playing tape if you interacted to early with the next one.
So when designing the level I had to make sure there was enough time between the tapes before a new one would be found.
Prototyping Mechanics
Green = standard movement, Yellow = sliding, Red = falling
Since our game was heavily relying on landscaping we had a collaboration together with our technical artist to create a material in Unreal Engine that would change its color based on landscape steepness.
By having this material in place I could quickly prototype the sliding mechanic by using a line trace and then identifying which angles the player would start sliding at.
