The Only Certainty

Date:

January - February 2024

Genre:

First-person destructive puzzle game

Role:

Level & Technical Designer

Engine:

Unity 2021.3.6f1

Description of the project:

A game prototype created in Unity over the course of 4 weeks where the goal is to reach the top of a supervillain's lair in a race against time as dangerous lava slowly rises up to meet you. The player is able to use a laser that can cut through specific materials to solve destructive puzzles.

I was responsible for:

Rapidly iterating the level with secret agent villain secret base theme with a focus on vertical progression using Unity Probuilder.
Creating 2 physics based puzzles utilizing tools created by our programming team.
Applying designer feedback and puzzle iterations into the prototype's final level.

Gameplay Trailer

Starting the level

When I do not yet have access to in-engine tools, I like to draw out me level ideas on paper (or in this case in MSPaint). Getting top-down views of your map helps figure out any glaring issues when it comes to horizontal traversal and I am able to rapidly iterate based on feedback.

As seen in the first drawing, I wanted the level to spiral upwards. The idea being the player is running in a circle of ascension with the center of the volcano being visible at all times to show lava rising in the crater.

First Level Idea

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First Level Idea

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Iterated Level Idea

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Iterated Level Idea

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Greyboxing Room Layout

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Greyboxing Room Layout

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Getting In-Engine

One the project was finally set up I was able to get myself in-engine and started greyboxing my level idea. I used Unity's ProBuilder, which is a vertices based modeling tool specifically designed for level design.

Adding Crater

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Adding Crater

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With the basic layout of the levels I was able to fill in the crater of the volcano. Since we had a very limited amount of time to work on this project I made sure the basic shape was cylindrical in nature.

Adding some functionality

With the main focus of our map being that it is inside of a supervillan's lair that is also a volcano, lava needed to be added.

Utilizing Unity Shader Graphs I created a shader that resembled lava. It wasn't perfect, but if conveyed what we needed it to.

I added functionality for it to rise upwards with a starting and end location. The user of the tool could set the time of how long the lava would take to reach the end location, thus setting the lava at a specific speed.

Adding Lava

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Adding Lava

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Lava Rising

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Lava Rising

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Finished Level

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Finished Level

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Final Iteration

After all of the puzzles for the level were completed individually, I stitched them together in culmination for the final iteration of our map. Every room still holds to the principal that the player should be able to look into the crater of the volcano at any time.

Final Iteration Top-Down

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Final Iteration Top-Down

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The top-down view of the final iteration shows that the puzzles vary wildly in sizes leading to massive differences in how large the rooms are. If I had more time on this project I would have scaled down the 3rd, 4th, and 5th puzzle so they would be similar to the sizes of the other puzzles.