Level Design

Hey gamers! We have come a long way since our first prototype, so I wanted to share the evolution of our level design from then until now.

When it comes to level design, the first step is always to sketch some concepts:      

These initial sketches don’t resemble the final levels very much, but they got the creative juices flowing and allowed the team to pick out bits they liked and wanted to utilize in the final design. From there, a sketch of the final concept was created:

The final design incorporated some of the team's favourite aspects from the original sketches, as well as aspects that supported the lore of the game. Because Exclusion Zone: Reclamation lacks a lot of explicit narrative cutscenes, it was up to the level design to convey the progression of the narrative over time. This particular sketch is for level five: the final level. It is meant to be the final stop on your journey back to the centre of the exclusion zone, and you will notice that there are no plants utilized as obstacles or as textures on the obstacles like there are in earlier levels.

After the concept was finalized, a rough Whitebox was created in Probuilder (a tool in Unity for quickly creating and editing shapes).

This Whitebox consisted of mostly placeholder assets meant to simulate the size and shape of the future finished assets.

It is important to create these placeholder assets as it gives the designers and coders in charge of the player movement the ability to test the height of jumps, the distance between obstacles, and the overall space and layout of the level. Without this, the speed, acceleration, jump height, etc. of the player character is arbitrary and has no way of being refined.

In furtherance of refining the player movement, more terrain assets were added to help flesh out the feel of the level and test the size and space occupied by the terrain.

Once testing was completed and the player movement, obstacles, and overall size of the level were refined, final assets could be placed in the level.

These assets improve the feel of the level a lot and help to immerse the player. I hope to refine this level—and all the others—even further as we continue developing Exclusion Zone: Reclamation!