Blood Temple
Level blockout
action adventure with stealth elements inspired by
classic adventure games like Tomb Raider & Uncharted
Unreal Engine 5
action adventure
single player
solo project
20-30 min
Overview
Level Goals
- classic adventure game level
- a fun and immersive experience, with elements of stealth, combat, cutscenes and collectibles
- medium to large sized linear level
- Core Game Pillars:
Exploration - Puzzle solving - Stealth encounters
Inspirations
- Tomb Raider
- Uncharted series
- Indiana Jones
Level Blockout
Top-down Map
Level Flow & Beats
Vistas
An important part of designing this level was creating a series of guidelines and vistas that lead the player throughout the experience.
Level Features
For this project I used a premade blueprint pack for Unreal, named IWALS - Interaction with Advanced Locomotion systems - which comes with a tonne of useful game ready features and mechanics, like enemy AI, climbing system, vaulting mantling systems and an inventory system with weapons and light sources.
Along with IWALS I scripted some basic events, like door sliding, trigger sounds and particles, and collecting certain objects.
Full Playthrough
Design Process
Level Description
Our protagonist finds themselves on the shores of a river village, somewhere deep in the Yucatan jungle. In the distance can be seen the tops and spires of The Great Temple Complex. Around them, smoke and commotion is stirring. The notorious Mercenary group is already there!
The protagonist must break through the jungle, abandoned tribal villages and temple ruins to find the legendary Blood Tear, the largest red diamond in the world, before the mercenaries get to it.
Themes
- exploration, adventure, historical fiction
- ancient ruins, mayan, mesoamerican architecture
- lush unexplored tropical jungles and rainforests
Level Beats & Flow
Layouts
Drawing layouts was especially fun on this project. I designed and sketched in many different scales, ranging from broad sketches showcasing the entire level, to the smaller scale drawings used to define the details of some spaces before starting them in 3D.
Detailed layout sketches
Level Setup
Blockout Iterations
After layouts and diagrams it was time to build the blockout. This was one of the largest and continuous level blockouts I have ever built. For the final import I had to cut the blockout into smaller chunks and setup mesh streaming and culling to have it be optimized during play.
Custom Blueprints for the Level
Testing
Playtesters feedback and notes were a great source of revision for the level. Not only did it produce bugs that were critical for playability of the level but also gave insight into what the players liked and disliked and gave me a clearer path to polish the level.
- playtesters liked the scale and the overall game feel the level exudes
- the most popular parts were: the waterfall, the temple entry and the temple vault
- most playtesters also really appreciated the little bits here and there that enhanced the overall experience - the secret under the waterfall, the way the first enemy is introduced, the scale of the temples and their grandeur, the possibility of choice in certain areas and the variability of different areas
- most testers were also very pleased with the pacing of the whole level
Level Bus and Fixes
- most of the drawbacks that the testers pointed out sprang from the duration of the level
- some players found that the level was too large overall, at least without a checkpoint system at the moment
- some found the climbing sections very tedious and think the level would benefit from removing them completely
- also some testers agreed that the AI could be unpredictable at times, and that the level layout and the configuration of encounter spaces could alleviate those problems instead of changing their code
Conclusion
This level taught me so much about level design and designing linear levels for action adventure type of games.
I think the most important lesson I took from it was: create the rough draft of the blockout as soon as possible, and test it. This would not only help with the size and duration of the level but also would help me focus only on the most important parts and cut the fat early in the process, so to say.
The final level that is featured in this page is only a fraction of the initial blockout from which I cut out 2-3 zones to get it to this state. I cut those parts late in the development, parts that were almost finished, which unfortunately took a lot of time. That is why next time, planning scale and pacing ahead, will be my first priority for this type of levels.