Available On:
My Roles:
Red: Flame & Fable
The Team:
An atmospheric 2d adventure that features Little Red Riding Hood on a quest to find her grandmother.
- Level Designer
- Environment Artist
- Animator
8 Month Project
8 Person team for the first half
12 Person team for the second half
During the first half of development, I was the sole level designer on the team. We only had one gameplay level at the time, since we were focusing on creating a vertical slice that we could pitch. As a result, Level documentation was minimal, and heavily focused on the one level we had.
We knew that had to change when we onboarded another designer to help with levels, so my first step was to make a level philosophy document. The most important thing that our levels needed to do was allow the player to explore without getting them lost or forcing them to backtrack to earlier areas.
You can see this design being utilized in the layout of our forest level below. At the crossroad, a kill box keeps the player preoccupied for long enough to notice a collectible flower at the entrance to the upper route, or a lamp post save point in the lower route.
At the end of these branches, shortcuts are made available though things like puzzle doors and falling stalagmites, allowing the player to quickly jump back to the initial crossroads and choose to explore in the other direction if they wish, without forcing them to run all the way back around.
This branching chunk can be repeated in different configurations as many times as needed.
But how do we actually make the levels themselves? Well, originally we had one giant tileset that was used to greybox our levels.
This thing was TERRIBLE!!!
- Editing the colliders on it to be consistent and line up well was a nightmare, and took hours.
- We were adding new environments to the game, which meant this tile set wouldn't even be useable.
- A lot of the set dressing was in the tile set as well, and adding layers of flowers/bushes meant adding layers to the unity grid, NOT FUN.
I was taking over the tileset art from one of the other artists, and I wanted to be able to make a lot of sets quickly. In addition to this, I did not want to inflict this mess on the new designer who was joining the team, so I knew something had to change.
I made a tileset framework, which you can see in the top half of this image. This framework was used for all of our levels, and was given a single set of simple colliders that would work across the entire game.
I was able to use it as reference for all of the aesthetic tiles I drew, ensuring they all lined up with each other perfectly. It also meant that I did not need to make new colliders for all of the separate levels.
The levels were greyboxed using the framework and it's colliders. The framework was then turned invisible, and the aesthetic tiles were laid on top.
Over the course of devel0pment, I learned so much about communication pipelines between environment artists and level designers. I spent the first four months of development struggling to explain what tiles I needed from our environment artist, which is how we ended up with the giant initial set. Figuring out this tile framework saved us so much time, and heavily improved communication between the different disciplines on our team.