The New Toy
Idea Summary:
In this level, the player assumes the role of a new toy that a kid has just received. As this new toy, it is the player's responsibility to explore the room and find their spot in the room with the help of some other toys.
Level Summary:
This level was originally planned off the idea of it being a bit weird and wacky. I had the idea from the start that I wanted to make something that was a bit different, so I played around with the word wacky for a bit and landed on a level where the player is smaller than all the objects in the room making the scale and the player feel off. Once I had settled on the idea of the player being a toy it felt right for the level to align more with the platformer genre and be child friendly.
About the Level:
- Developed in Unreal Engine 4
- Character and character systems from Advanced Locomotion Systems V4 (LongmireLocomotion)
- Used assets from the Blocking Starter Pack (Xavier Loux)
- Various models created in Maya
The Challenge:
This project was a challenge of scale, how do you keep the mechanics of the game feeling correct when you and the items around the level are incorrect.
The biggest example of this was the implementation of climbing, within this level there are various items you can climb and jump over. As the items were a range of sizes and all were much larger than the player it was a challenge to design these objects to allow for semi-realistic climbing and not to just make it look like steps.
Video Demo
Moodboard
Level Design Methods
Colouring - With this level blockout I wanted to take on some feedback I had gotten from the TLOU level that was to colour coordinate aspects of the level to make it more readable. To achieve this I made the assets that the player can interact with purple, the floor and climbable objects are green, while red objects are danger. This shows the player the surfaces and objects that they can either climb, walk or interact with.
Vantage Points - In this level there are a lot of points at which the player can climb up high and get a good view of the level. These views help the player when it comes to finding the collectibles for their objective. But it more importantly
gives them a view of what lies ahead in the level, this gives them landmarks to head for when they get back to ground level and gives them an indicator of how far they have come when they reach a landmark they saw from the vantage point, this also creates the illusion of space.
Leading the Player - In this level I used the characters that the player interacts with to lead and guide them. This aligns more with the aim of making this a more child friendly level along with the typical platform game cliches that players have come to know. Other ways the player is lead is through the colour contrast on certain aspects like the green objects in the red lava section in the middle of the level, as well as the placement of certain objects, drawing the players eye to their next goal.
Puzzles - Throughout the level there are a few objectives and puzzles that the player must complete. These are implemented to break up the exploration in the level and give the player a small challenge to overcome to progress through the level. The puzzles are not particularly hard, that is because I designed the level with the player in mind being younger but I think in future I could probably make the puzzles a little bit harder as they probably are a bit too easy.
