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Racheal Klink
LEVEL DESIGNER
Level Design
The Veiled Viper Level
This project is a sci-fi themed level. The player takes control of Orion, a pilot tasked with infiltrating an alien space station and stopping their new weapon from being powered. It is a stealth mission with emphasis on using Orion's suit ability to blend in with the environment. This ability is used in tandem with his suit's AI - Kori - that accompanies him during this mission.
Old top-down
I started with a basic map design in tandem with a walkthrough for my original design. However, I went back and forth on this design and how much I could actually build in a timely manner.
In the end, this map was essentially redone as when I began building in Unreal Engine, I realized that my original top-down map didn't accurately depict the size of my level.
Additionally, the way I was trying to incorporate height simply wasn't feasible. Thus, I finished building the level in Unreal engine and redid my top-down map after I had completed the layout.
New top-down
I went on to utilize simple shapes to model out specific assets within the alien space station that Orion would be going through. It was a bit of a slow process, but I felt that for this project I wanted to showcase my eye for detail. Slowly, the halls began to fill with the assets that I created and saved in my folder to be reused in places throughout the level.
It took quite a while to get my mock stand-in enemies to patrol the halls the way I wanted them to. But I think it works well, especially in such a small space too. There were a lot of design elements that I had to really consider when it came to the enemies. One such element was if they could crawl through vents and such - taking a bit of inspiration from the Alien game. I ultimately decided against this though as I wanted these enemies to have a different feel to them in the sense of Orion possibly being detected and the mission failed. Yet, I wanted them to feel intelligent and so I created moments where they were alerted to certain events happening, such as locking down one of the doors after Orion enters the hall. Or chasing Orion when he enters a room.
Another design choice I made later on was near the end of the level. At first I had Orion utilize a ventilation shaft to get to the final area after being locked in a room with one of the enemies. This was a very simple fade to black and fade in with Orion at his end destination. Unfortunately, this didn't really work out as well as I wanted because it felt lacking. I decided I needed something else more engaging. So, I created an enemy bomb, sort of like a prototype of what Orion was there to stop anyway, on a smaller scale. Distracting the enemy and forcing the doors closed gives Orion the chance to blast open the other door and get to his objective. Besides, explosions are fun.
Old time-line
Tanise Hub Level
The Tanis Hub Level is meant to embody a place that a player can return to often. Places like Stormwind in World of Warcraft, or Sumeru in Genshin Impact. It's meant to be a living city and where the player can interact with certain NPCs to deal in trade or even to get new information and maybe even new quests. Still, I ran into a handful of issues while building this level. The first being that I unfortunately built it too large. At the time, my old computer was having a bit of a rough patch, and I didn't have access to my drawing tablet. Which made making a detailed map rather difficult. Not that I'm great at building maps to begin with as it takes at least two tries to get it close to right. Though my map didn't see a reiteration, unfortunately, the level design in engine did. A couple of times honestly. But the main premise of the story remained: explore the city and in so doing, help some of the citizens.
The old map gave me a general idea of what this town would look like. I knew I wanted a river to run through it, but I wasn't entirely sure how. Did it run directly through the center? Was it off to the side? Was it beyond the walls and just nearby?
As I was working on the level in engine, I finally settled on this idea that it would be really cool to have this river split the town, with one side being raised a little higher than the other. It would help give elevation and make the area all the more unique to look at and explore. My next problem was how to get from one side to the other.
Hand-Drawn Topdown
Despite liking this idea of one side of the village being raised up as if a quake had split it in two, I just couldn't work in a good-looking bridge in the amount of time I had to create this. So, I decided to level out each side, kept the river, and instead built smaller raised areas that eventually led to having an upper section of the town directly over the water. From here, I felt rather inspired, and the design work of the little town came together a lot quicker.
I took the opportunity to really dig into designing what the "cavern" area would look like that goes underneath the upper section of Tanise. Hanging stalactites fill the underneath and to enhance it further, I created a set of hanging lanterns to light the way across the bridge. Up top, I created a giant water wheel and a overlook to go with it. Other than the bridge beneath the overpass, this section of the town is my favorite. The water wheel took quite a lot of work though. I struggled to get it to turn properly and fought with the sequencer a lot. It was the last item to get working, and even then it wasn't entirely perfect.
This level, despite how much design work went into it, does suffer from being a bit too large though. The streets are far too empty and there's just too much "space" in-between areas in the small town. Though I say small reluctantly.
I would love to go back to this design and work on filling it in more. Maybe even slim it down even more. The quests could use some work too. The current quest line is rather linear, going and talking to a couple NPCs to get a blueprint and a blacksmith to help fix the broken bridge beneath the overpass.
Maybe with a bit more time and focus, I could even go back to the original quest line idea which actually involved leaving Tanise briefly to find an NPC who is helping a baby dragon. This baby dragon, originally, would become the main character's companion and help her along her journey after leaving Tanise. I even had planned some simple puzzles in the town and possibly even finding collectibles. All of which had to be removed from the final stages of design as it was just far too much to implement at the time.
Skyrim Side Story Level
The Skyrim side story level was both stressful and fun to make. I excel at larger environments, but it can be overwhelming too. Skyrim is huge already; the vastness of the game is awe inspiring honestly. It's probably why my husband enjoys the game so much. I had to do a lot of research on Skyrim, though. Unfortunately, I don't play first person games due to motion sickness, so I had to rely on heavy research into walkthroughs and wikis, as well as my husband's fan-knowledge to bring this level to life. I delved deep into what Skyrim caves looked like, even down to what a typical entrance looked like. I really wanted to push myself to try to recreate a Skyrim level to the best of my ability - even if this particular side quest isn't actually in Skyrim anywhere.
My Skyrim map was probably the first time that I didn't really need to redo it. With all the research I'd done, I had a really good idea of what this level was going to look like already, which was great. Once I got the map down, I dove right into level design. This level in particular is nearly a one-to-one from top-down map to in engine design.
The only major change would be the last branching cavern before the Inner Sanctum. On the top-down map it doesn't reconnect with the entrance, which if I were a Skyrim player, I would have known that once a quest was finished - especially in caves - a short cut back to the entrance would be available. This shortcut is implemented in engine.
The start of this level is actually outside of the cave system and in a little valley at the base of a mountain range. The hero's village is attacked by cave trolls and his family taken. With this premise, I began my work with research. I needed to know the lore of Skyrim. I even went so far as to dig deep into the world and get it's history back during a time with the dragon priests. This history really hooked me, so I leaned into it and did my best to sprinkle that into the level design.
In addition to lore research, I also wanted to make sure that the design of the level matched as closely to a Skyrim level as I could. So I looked up what a typical house in Skyrim might look like. Which, honestly was a bit difficult because what player really check's out a house design while running around trying to get after a bandit? I eventually found some designs and chose to stick to one. I built it out in Unreal Engine as closely as I could from the reference material using the simple shapes in engine.
I even went so far as to look at the design of torches, abandoned houses, and a typical layout of what a bandit's hideout in a cave would look like and what was on display there. I tried to implement as much as I could. Even going into Maya and modeling out certain things like potion bottles, cheese wheels (oh yes, I added a lot of cheese...), the torches, bags of gold, and even the cave pillars.
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