SPITE: Divine Descent
- a top-down sight-seeing and monster slaying adventure
”Spirits from the dead are rising, only with mystical martial arts will the spirits and their king be banished.
Descend the mountain to stop them.”
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The team:
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3 Level Designers
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5 Game Artists
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5 Game Programmers
Production time:
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14 weeks half-time
Engine:
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Custom game engine
My Contribution:
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Designing level layouts and foreshadowing vistas
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Blocking out geometry and placing gameplay elements
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Setting gameplay metrics
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Balancing gameplay
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Set dressing environments
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Music composition
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Part of audio taskforce
Process
Pre-production
As always, my process started with research. Since the project was heavily inspired by the Diablo series, I studied a dungeon layout from Diablo III.
The next step was to do a drawover of the dungeon map. This map served as inspiration for the sketches I was about to make for our current game project.
Drawing inspiration from the best in this way, is an important step for me since you don’t want to reinvent the wheel over and over again. In other words, I'm a big proponent of skipping unnecessary steps that don't contribute to the quality of the final game.
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Alpha
The blockout was done in Unity but it needed to be exported into a separate engine for testing.
This was a challenge and it was critical to plan for these valuable testing sessions to make the most out of my time, developing the level.
Since it was time consuming to test the levels, techniques such as labeling key level elements directly in the editor was important to the processes of both the team and I.
Beta
Set dressing was a big focus for me in the beta. In this game, it was very important to tell a convincing story through the environment as it was a big selling point of the game.
To the right is an example of how I improved the feel of the starting area of the game, with props lifting the feeling of majesty at this point of interest.
Reflections
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Since the engine was built and improved on during the project, I'm glad I started building out the levels on paper at an early stage, without waiting for features to be ready and instead finding creative solutions to our problems
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If I were to work on a project like this again, I would make sure to communicate the need level designer need of having a smooth playtesting feature for rapid iteration
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Even though the process may have been cumbersome at times, the project underlined the power of creative problem solving when limited by technology