Level Progression Designs

Our game's core surrounds the fact that everything you see can be a weapon, whether it's a bonsai plant or a thick manga. While we have multiple buildings and streets, it's important to keep the focus on the main areas of the gameplay and where players will find the most items that could potentially be weapons.

“As the Design  Lead, one of my tasks is to design the environment's aesthetics and the forming of those environments involves research, sketching and bouncing information between myself and our lead 3D artist Deklan. The game has a setting similar to 1980s Tokyo and Hong Kong, and for Level 1 my goal was to show evidence of the people living there as well as provide ample throwable objects for makeshift weapons. Deklan and Phoebe settled on the level design for Level 1 and laid out the street pathways and the main building’s floor plans. Once these were blocked out in 3D I would take screenshots of the model and open it in a graphics editor - either Adobe Photoshop or PaintTool Sai - to sketch designs over the buildings and rooms. This would provide information to our lead 3D modeller Deklan when detailing and making our cubes look like buildings, and our empty rooms with props relevant to the purpose of said room.. 

The specific example I am using is the Bar. The building the player could enter is the “gang hideout” that has an exclusive bar which acts as a front for their less than legal activities. It is the first room accessible in the basement floor of the hideout as agreed within the group before I started sketch overs. This room had considerably more attention given to it since the team settled on it being a key feature of the level separating it from other levels. 

The general workflow is as follows:

1. Level Block Out: No objects and props in the scene (Note additional rooms on the right side of the image were added at a later date).

1. Sketch over where decisions are made on floor layout and recommended prop locations. The largest room on the left side is the bar and shows the main serving table and seating arrangements. My designs were guided by visual research on private bars and hostess clubs located in Japan which I had compiled into a moodboard.

1. Prop Block outs completed by Deklan based on the sketch overs. 

1. Additional Sketch over the prop block out to define the prop designs further and set the then intended mood and atmosphere.  

1. Final prop models created by Deklan with some additional flourishes on his part based on the initial moodboard for the room. At this stage the objects all have flat textures on them to help define the props from one another, as well as direct the suggested colour scheme.

At this stage the models have been unwrapped and are having their final textures applied before the room is considered complete. There may still need tweaking to get it where I would like it visually but it has been enjoyable watching it evolve from an empty room into a Bar space. And don’t worry, we’ll be sure to add in plenty of bottles for players to enjoy throwing about ;)” - Kris (Design Lead)

Thanks for tuning in once again! We look forward to sharing more soon...