Doom Level Test
Personal Project | May 27th - June 17th
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Engine and Tools
UE4 | Adobe Illustrator
Mechanics
The mechanics have one gun with a double jump, a double dash, and a melee to interact with dynamic objects in the environment. Wall grabbing, pickups, narrative lines, destructible walls, are all elements added to the game.
My Work
I was responsible to do the conceptualization, whiteboxing, blueprinting, set dressing, lighting, and optimization for this level. I created all the functionality within this level, such as the prototyped AI, everything said in the mechanics section, and all other elements of this game. I was not responsible for asset creation.
Asset Packs
Infinity Lands Fire | Infinty Lands Ice | Soul City | Soul Cave
Design Process
Design Goal
First Person Shooter with Doom gameplay as the focus. This three week test was to create a well scoped level with environmental storytelling and fast paced gameplay.
Preproduction
Mood Board
Layout and Sketches
After establishing what type of aesthetic, mood, and tone I'm going after through research, I sketched out the shape of the ship to understand roughly how I want to have the room layouts and to contextualize my ideas into a visual format. Afterwards I develop the layout based off my sketches.
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Whiteboxing
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Blueprinting and Technical Work
For this project I was constrained to only using the FPS template provided by UE4. Since Doom as a franchise is inherently combat oriented, I wanted to create a blueprinted system to simulate enemies coming after the player as the player jumps around the environment with different health, movement speed, and silhouettes.
On top of that, I wanted to create other fun aspects of Doom gameplay, such as incentives to explore, movement mechanics to make it fun exploring, and the voice lines that filled in bits of quest information to clue in the context of the mission.
(In Progress of getting videos)
Doom Gameplay
Click Image to View More
Set Dressing
Conveyance
I used the pyramid as a goal for conveyance. The pyramidal structure is always in view, uses a purple emissive to draw the player's eyes, and strong, angular lines. Throughout the level I used purple lighting as goal points for the player to get to. The strong, angular lines were represented through the architecture layout, and the gameplay made it so that whenever the player progressed in the level they were instantly facing exactly where they needed to go.
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Kitbashing
Everything within this level was built through the asset pack's modularity. I began with kitbashing the environment from the outside in to better understand how the environment would impact the flow of the gameplay through testing it with the whitebox, then developing the structures I whiteboxed into meshing with the environment.
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Lighting
From my research into the Doom franchise I noted that Doom tended to have a color scheme where one color would be the primary characteristic of the level, another color for grabbing the player's eyes, and then typically a contrasting color dispersed throughout the environment. With that in mind, I wanted to mimic some of the more spooky levels in Doom Eternal between the Argent and Maykr levels.
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Optimization
Due to Doom's focus on gameplay, I wanted to ensure that the set dressing and lighting was optimized for 60 fps, while also getting as much out of the environment as much as possible. I made sure that certain areas received more attention to lightmapping and dynamic lighting, such as beauty shots in the beginning,
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