Dungeon
Delve
A vertical slice of a Dungeon Crawler created for our 'End of Year Production' assignment at AIE.
Corruption has fallen upon the kingdom. After returning from her trip to empower the kingdom's artefact for her rule, the Queen has returned to find her son having taken control of the kingdom and bringing it to ruin. After an initial confrontation she was forced to retreat and escape to a safe campsite. Forced to sharpen her now ruined blade, and having held only the now depowered relics she plans her assault on her former home, destroying those that have corrupted it and retrieving the small pieces that still remain pure.
Roles and Responsibilities:
Level Designer
Working alongside another Level Designer was new for me, but it was both of our jobs to communicate our ideas to eachother clearly, and to maintain consistent idealogy and techniques so that neither of our levels looked the same, or so different you could tell who had built which one.
System Designer
I was in charge of creating some of the games systems, more specifically that of those in the main menu, and in the Levels I and the other Level Designer created. This included a functional main menu, a kill counter that played animations, raising elevators and more. It was my responsibilty to talk to other designers and programmers about these functions, making sure it never conflicted with anything they had already made.
Release Info
December 12th 2023
GENRE
Dungeon Crawler, Hack and Slash
PLATFORM
PC
Team Members & Duration
14 Students | 18 weeks
Tools Used
Unity, Photoshop, ZBrush, Maya
A stitch of all 6 Hallway variants I created
A cut 'Staircase climbing' boss room I greyboxed and concepted functionality for.
Features
Easy To Understand Controls
Brisk Animations
Environmental Storytelling
Beautifully Constructed Levels
Full Controller Support
LEVEL DESIGN
UI/Systems Design
GAME EVALUATION
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While only just, all deadlines were met when they needed to be.
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Team members always had something to do.
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Playtesting always proved extremely helpful
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Our Lead Designer soon noticed that not everyone in the group was as passionate as he was about the project, which would lead to some minor scoping issues. This is when we decided to step back from making a fully fledged game, and rather a Vertical Slice of what our Team Leader wanted.
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Deciding to market it as a Vertical Slice removed some stress from members of the group, but also meant we had to look at the project a bit differently. (A bit like this)
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Instead of building a skyscraper out of cheap mateirals, we built an office complex out of decent mateirals with the INTENT of turning it into a skyscaper should things go to plan.
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Around the same time as the Level Design change, we noticed that due to our project developing more 'Run The Gauntlet' traits rather than the intended Dungeon Crawler, it would be wise for us to start moving forward in that direction. So we did.
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We were noticing that the difficulty curve and the reward/compulsion loops were becoming more and more different than what we designers had intended. Making the change to Gauntlet over Crawler meant that the bonus' between each run had to be more impactful, so we buffed up the upgrades the player could get, and started making the rooms the same level of difficulty.
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Halfway through the project, when we realised through testing and teacher feedback that our 3 floor castle strcutre was bland and was tedious, we designed a series of rooms that had themes or gimmicks.
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Doing this allowed us to divide up the work easier, delegate tasks to much more specific areas, and a lot easier. This decision overal just made Level Design much easier, and more entertaining for both the developers and the player. Creating different styled rooms also allowed for variation among playthroughs, eliminating the boring and tedious aspects.