Level Dev Blog Entry #1
3 weeks ago, I started my first semester at Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, on the Level Design track.
In our first week we launched a collaborative "Three Room Level" assignment where a team of 3 Level Design students collaborate with a team of Art students to create a level based on a pre-existing story using 3 relatively small rooms.
For our team, we chose the story of Dante's Inferno and settled on adapting 3 of the 9 levels of Hell present in the story. I decided to tackle the 1st circle of Hell which represents Lust with the vision being that the player must navigate moving platforms that are being affected by the winds of a storm.
Now is an apt time to mention that prior to my current Level Design class, I never touched Unreal Engine, and was strictly a self-taught Level Designer. This meant that I had to navigate learning how to develop with an unfamiliar software and learn how to work with other designers on a shared project.
During class we were given the opportunity to learn the basics of several of Unreal Engine's tools which provided me the basis on which to create the block mesh of my level. The array of modeling tools proved extremely helpful in creating a block mesh that was more aesthetically pleasing than I had anticipated.
This some of my practice with the various tools in Unreal Engine.
My next challenge was to discover how to implement the mechanics of my level. This is where Google and YouTube proved to be very useful. I learned how to use level sequencing to create animation for my various platforms, meaning that they continuously rotate and move along a set path. I also learned how to use blueprints to create a checkpoint and respawn system so that falling into the fog below, causes the player to respawn.
This allowed me to learn a lot, but the work in progress version of my level may or not continue on to the final iteration of the project. This is due to the fact that each of the 3 rooms are so visually distinct that the project may be over scoped, especially in consideration of the amount of assets that the Art students would have to make. So me and my fellow Level Designers are planning to meet to see how we can re-work our levels to limit the scope and make our 3 levels more unified.
This is my progress of what I created for this work in progress version of my level with the video providing a playthrough of it.
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