Spite: Catharsis
Top Down Action RPG
Play as a troubled monk on a deep astral journey within.
Wielding the skills of your warrior past, face your inner demons, conquer your emotions,
and confront your past self in a final battle for inner peace.
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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2 Technical Artists
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6 Game Programmers
Production Time:
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Pre-production 4 weeks half-time.
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Development 10 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 1.
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Boss level iterations.
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Level Art.
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Collaborated with Technical Artists to develop tools with Houdini Engine.
Key Highlights
Procedural Workflow
This was the first time we had technical artists in our projects and we wanted to test a new pipeline and workflow for level designers. By using Houdini Engine with Unreal Engine we created different tools that could help us create fences, cliffs and terrain for us to use.
Since we wanted our setting to be more organic rather than man made we needed a way to create imperfections for terrain and such.
In hindsight this was a fun workflow to try out and at the same time learn a little about Houdini. But I think that we had a hard time iterating on the levels since there were so many steps and manual work needed to change a mesh, cleaning up navmesh and that it imported correctly into our own engine at the end with materials applied.
Navmesh Cleaning
When working with a custom engine one thing that was a challenge was importing navmesh from Unreal Engine and then import it into our own engine.
Since Unreal generated navmesh for us we needed to export it as an .fbx and then import it into Blender and clean it up, which meant going over edges and vertices so everything was merged together. Because having holes or vertices not connected together would mean that the player would have issues moving on those areas.
Pre-Production
I started the project by collecting references for the location I was going to create and look at environments from Diablo 3. Then I made a quick overview for what elements would be featured in the first level.
I also made the overview and collaborated with my other level designers on creating the boss arena level.
