Bewildered

Level design

There were 2 level designers in this project where I was the lead on the whole level.

The idea at first was to make 2 levels, the bottom of the mountain where the player was onboarded and where the first adventure challenge was introduced and the top of the mountain where there would be more advanced challenges and the ending of the game.

I was in charge of the bottom of the mountain and thus made the onboarding, the meeting point of player and monster and the first challenge. Later on due to lack of challenges for the mountain top we decided to merge both together into one level and thus the current level struction was born.

Challenges

One of the difficulties of this project was the lack of art and gameplay direction and also a big time constraint. So as a suddenly made level designer, I took it upon myself to not only make a level that would bring out the gameplay elements we already had, I also wanted to set the art direction to help out the artists. 

Previously I had made a few narrative outlines for the game, and because we did not have any other visual references I used that as a basis for my level blockout. Due to the time constraint we had (max 8 weeks left) I decided to make the level more vertical and make the level mountainous. At first the idea was to make the level inside, as a cavelike structure. However shortly after that I noticed that this will be over scoped as we only had a few artists.

Afterwards I started a mountainous blockout with placeholder assets which helped the artists with their vision and art bible. After about 6 iterations the last blockout was ready and the artists were ready to setdress the level.