LEVEL DESIGNER
Spell Flingers
A fast paced, chaotic party game for up to 4 players.
"• Compete against your friends in different worlds with a large arsenal of spells to find out who the best Spell flinger is!"
Our group logo
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The team:
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3 Level Designers
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4 Game Artists
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2 Animators
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6 Game Programmers
Production time:
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9 weeks full-time = Around 360 hours.
Engine:
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Used "Unity" as a level editor
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Used an in-house engine
My Contribution:
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Level Designing all levels together with LD colleague, where we had ownership of one level each but with heavy feedback
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Level Propping / Level Art
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Lighting all scenes
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Member in Weapons task force
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Member in Hazards task force
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Member in Gameplay task force
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Member in Enviroment task force
PROJECT SHOWREEL
Feel free to scroll through the images to view our process and in-game scenes that I have been a part of.
My contribution.
On this project I was in charge of design and environmental art of half of the levels in the game. Going in I made sure to get plenty of reference material from the game we took inspiration from, Duck Game. I started of by playing it and then moved on to making levels in their level editor which allowed me to test metrics and gameplay right away even before we had anything playable. The way I thought about designing the levels in Spell Flingers was that I wanted each map to feel unique and that each of them was either balanced for all players or had a certain gimmick to them in order to break up the gameplay and keep it fresh. The levels was split into two different biomes in order to avoid visual fatigue, Sky island and Crystal caves Biomes.
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Sky 01
This level was the first level I created and was one of the "balanced" maps. all players have the same weapon available to them to make the combat fair. The trick on this level became an event that starts shortly after the level starts where a Thundercloud spawns that look for the players and tries to zap them with lightning creating quite a chaotic scramble in order the get to cover. This forces the players to engage each other in close combat.
This made it important to give the player many ways to get to cover and so a risky path down was created in the middle where the player was furthest from cover.
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Sky 02
While there is a obvious path on this level for the player to go which is to go and grab the weapon closest to them, after playing the level many times I wanted to make sure that you could change up your strategy and do different things to catch your opponent off guard. Also made sure to have different elevations on all weapon spawns as I was worried that if they where on the same elevation, players would grab a weapon at the same time and instantly fire at each other. Putting the weapons on different elevation meant that players where allowed to maneuver a bit before engaging each other.
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Sky 03
This level was designed with the theme in mind. When I suggested that one of the biomes should be sky islands, this was the level I thought of. My idea was to have several floating island that where difficult to get to through jumping alone and using bounce pads which launches the player upwards in order to traverse the small islands. At the top I added two weapons that where different than the others to entice the players to use the bounce pads to move upwards.
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Sky 04
This level was designed as a team deathmatch where two people would spawn on one side and the other two on the other. It was inspired by facing worlds from unreal tournament. The level contains long range arching "grenade launcher" which allows the players to stay at their castle and shoot at the other side. At the bottom players can pick up a short range "machine gun" which will allow them to charge the other castle as something we realized after playtesting was that it was quite hard to hit players with the long range so adding short range allowed them to make a risky play to end the match faster.
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Sky 05
This level was a small, frantic level designed to force players to think and act quick. The two weapons in the middle are riskier to get but better to use. Whereas the weapons below are safer but worse. Due to the frantic nature of the level I thought it would be interesting to add a spike pit, meaning that if the players act too quick, without care they might slip up and kill themselves leading to quite a few silly and fun moments.
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Crystal 01
I designed this to be a quick draw level where the fastest player would win. Player start positioning became very important. Due to player jump arch's it became clear that the player further away could arrive at the weapon in the middle at the same time as the ones closer to it as they had more momentum going into the jump. In the end some loves it other hate it but because it is such a gimmicky level it works to break up the pacing of the gameplay very well and became one of the more memorable levels.
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Crystal 02
This was one of the earlier levels I created. I wanted to make a level where there where no safe spots. Where they could be attacked from any direction at all times, forcing the player to be in constant motion. It became one of the more competitive levels and allowed players to try and outmaneuver each other rather than shooting randomly and hoping for the best. It was one of the levels that worked right of the bat with only a few changes made by adding the portals at each end to create more angles of attack.
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Crystal 03
Most likely the longest level in the game. One of the ideas we had was to create a platform race type level where the difficult part was not to defeat your opponents but rather the level itself. I came up with the idea of adding two paths, one safe and one fast but risky. It was one of the more experimental levels and what we found during playtesting was that it was very fun the first time and after that if players found out that would not reach the single weapon at the end in time they would try to circle around and get to the weapon after it respawned. While it does not play as intended it still became a memorable level.
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Crystal 04
A more straightforward level designed to be symmetrical.
The two bounce pads at the bottom allow the lower spawning players to move upwards and the spikes placed in-between left and right allows the players to shoot them and drop them on their opponents heads. Fairly uncomplicated which allowed for a good change of pace.
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Crystal 05
This level was initially designed to have a middle room filled with bounce pads all around the room. The bounce pads ended up not working the way we first envisioned I had to make some changes to the level. This was the level that needed most iteration to make it fun. Eventually what we came up with was to add a short melee weapon in the middle room and add grenades at the other locations which meant that getting the melee weapon became quite risky as someone could throw a grenade into the bounce room which would in turn bounce up and kill the player going for the melee weapon.
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Crystal 06
Another level that was quite different initially. When I first came up with this level it was entirely surrounded by spikes meaning players would have to be quite careful moving around the level but as we made changes to the bounce pads we realized that the players who used the bounce pads ended up hitting the ceiling and into the spikes there so we ended up removing the ceiling. We also added a random weapon spawner on the middle platform to make a otherwise simple level more replayable.