Delumination
Four Weeks
Time Period
8 Developers
Team
Level Designer,
Set Dressing
Areas
Unreal Engine 5
Engine
Concept
"Delumination" is the fourth game project I worked on at Futuregames. It's a first-person adventure where you play as an agent on the mission to stop a world disaster from happening within three days while you're stuck in a time-loop.
My responsibilities included worldbuilding, traditional and technical level design from blocking to set dressing. I also worked further on lighting and some other technical aspects.
The game is set in the town called "Elysium Town" where we wanted to make the whole game interconnected across levels and have a metroidvania feel as well.
My main goal was to design a "real" town that evokes emotions and makes the player feel like an inhabitant and spark curiosity no matter where they are in the town. I explored that through altering the scales and layouts of each area.
Elysium Town
Pre-Production
After setting the concept and the story, I had the responsibility of creating the world space, the scale of the town and its areas.
I started by doing research on games with strong city-building design and I found Dishonored and Assassin's Creed Syndicate very helpful for reference. I researched them thoroughly to understand the city planning and the structure of each sequence.
Sketches
This helped me start iterating on sketches and Ideas for the layout of the land and how each area serves a purpose.
Through thorough communication and ideation, Elysium town a clearer picture and sense of each area, which also correlated with the narrative and later quest design of the game.
For a clear picture, I blocked out an area to see what we wanted and didn't want. After that, I moved on to blocking out the entire town during pre-production for save time.
Setting up the entire layout created a strong sense of direction for the game and further helped the team with the quest design, the tone of each area and the kinds of art assets we found appropriate.
Level Design
After setting everything for the story and progression of the game, I got everything blocked out. Since the game is a walking simulator, I focused on giving as much emotion and immersiveness as possible by paying the most attention to exploration, spatial design and interaction.
Through worldbuilding, I made sure that the player instantly sees the main objective of the game, the floating city in the sky, and also feels a sense of smallness and pressure due to the landmarks and the scale of the town.
With the help of my other teammates, we split up blocking out after I created the layout of it all, which fortunately was done early in the pre-production phase.
-
Updated the team each time a section of the blockout was finished.
-
Iterated on the design based on feedback from the team and other testers.
-
Elevated the player experience by creating fluctuating areas, ranging from narrow to wide, which kept the player curious.
-
Valued verticality immensely, which kept the whole level from feeling plain.
-
Created a sense of direction for the player through light, exposition and composition, and landmarks.
-
Made sure the level had smooth transitions between areas and emphasized the Metroidvania feel by making areas unlockable through quests.
Level
&The Technical
Further on, I made sure to give attention to some technical aspects within the game, but mostly things to help the flow of the experience.
-
Initially made a level loading system to have smooth transitions between areas and improve performance.
-
Made seamless level transitions between exterior and interior levels to avoid breaking player immersion.
-
Set up a gondola system that emphasized an important quest location and a dynamic experience.
-
Set up level sequence lighting to attract attention with flickering lights
-
Due to performance issues, I set up a seamless LOD to all the high-poly-buildings.
Challenges
& Solutions
-
The shader within the game was making the player feel like everything looked the same.
-
This was solved by having different scales, structures and layouts in each area. Lighting areas in different ways and dressing them with various objects helped the game feel more dynamic.
-
-
High-poly assets were impacting the performance.
-
I set up an LOD, which didn't affect the player experience, and outside a certain distance it seamlessly improved the performance.
-
-
Due to unexpected setbacks during the project, there was too much level space and not enough content.
-
By iterating this several times with testers, I blocked off areas more fluidly by dressing and creating different routes between level transitions.
-
Reflection
-
Setting up a clear plan for progression and layout from the get-go really makes a huge difference in projects. That way there is enough time for alterations and tweaks without time pressure.
-
Clear as day, the value of scale. Working on both level design and set dressing, I really got to feel how it is for other functions within the game development process, and how having a clear sense of scale makes a real difference.
-
After this project finished up, and seeing how each area in the town differentiate in its own way, I realized it's not enough. All the areas need to have something of value, something engaging and something attractive to the players eye.
-
This time around, I focused heavily on communication, updating the team with every step I took and making sure everyone who needed the information received it. With some unexpected setbacks during the project, this really proved the value of communicating within the team