Isle of Bones
Personal Project | Jan 2020 - May 2020
Design Process
Design Goal
Creating a third person fantasy adventure level with challenging gameplay in a gothic castle. Isle of Bones is designed to give players an exploratory focused experience.
Engine and Tools
UE4 | Adobe Illustrator
Mechanics
Since the level design had a focus in big, expansive gameplay and exploration, I wanted that to be a mechanical focus and chose archery and teleportation to be the main mechanics of the level.
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Archery: The player uses archery to attack enemies and eliminate obstacles. This archery skill is made more useful by a slow-down time aim mechanic and explosive arrows for area of effect damange.
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Teleportation: The teleportation allows players to find good vantage points to snipe enemies and finding hidden pickups.
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Rolling and Dodging: The player has the ability to roll out of the way and dodge backwards, letting the player bait enemies.
My Work
Over the course of this project I was responsible for conceptualization, whiteboxing, blueprinting playtesting, set dressing, lighting, and optimization. The work I am not responsible for were the base mechanics and the art assets from the asset packs. with the caveat that I modified many of the mechanics and art assets. Spoken in more detail of below.
Asset Packs
Dynamic Combat System | Flowers and Plants Nature Pack | Gothic Island | Infinity Blade Assets | Infinity Blade Warriors | Medieval Dungeon | PhotoR Backgrounds | Skeleton Archer | Soul City | Watermill
Preproduction
Mood Board
Outlines and Sketches
After creating a mood board I first sketch out the environment to understand the world I am generally placing this level within, then concentrate on generating the player experience within.
Whiteboxing
Blueprinting and Technical Work
In this project I created many blueprints for event sequencing as well as modifying asset pack blueprints and retargeting asset pack animations to new skeletal meshes to keep the overall experience of the level cohesive. I go into the blueprints more here, but below are the core blueprints I created from scratch to interact with player generat
Isle of Bones Blueprints
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Set Dressing
Conveyance
I used a series of assets in order to inform the player of many things, such as alternate paths, item locations, and potential encounters.
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Natural Conveyance: I used violet and red flowers, white trees, green topped rocks, and generally more vibrant natural assets to draw the player's eyes to potential paths, items, and the playable area.
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Architectural Conveyance: I primarily used statues, symbols, and fire lighting to convey direct paths to the end goal of the level as well as reinforcing which direction leads to confrontation and which ones bring resources.
Kitbashing
While the Gothic Island asset pack had a few model buildings to show how everything wrapped together, the design and scaling of these structures were better for first person rather than third person. My solution was to utilize the modular assets they had as well as adding UI tiling functionality to the materials in order to build the structures I needed.
Lighting
Due to the size of the environment and the many structures, I used the directional light to get as interesting shadows and show off the castle as best as I could. After that, I focused on my vista shots, such as the castle face, the tower, the gate, etc., in two ways. I either used a lighter, more intense blue to draw the player's eye to areas that the player does not interact with or to indicate secret paths, while I used firelight to draw the player to the areas I wanted the player to go to and explore. With the details focused and player path set, I did several passes over the map to eliminate dark shadows and bring out the interesting faces of all the architecture.
Optimization
Part of my design process was to keep an eye on light optimization, lightmapping, collision, and texture streaming.