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LEAD LEVEL DESIGNER

Coming Soon

  • 13 developers

  • 5 months

  • Open world

  • Sandbox

  • Single-player

Summary:
Up In The Air  is a single-player, open world, sandbox game where you play as a simple balloon dog who is lost in an old rundown theme park that has been overrun by unsupervised children. The game has a silly tone to it as the player explores the park playing games and completing tasks to earn powerups, skins, and prizes. The various children of the park interact and try to hinder the player while they explore the carnival, western, and medieval areas of Weenie World. The game always puts a smile on the player's face and allows them to explore wherever and play however they want while still providing structure through minigames, arenas, and more.
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My Part in the Game

Responsibilities as Lead LD

  • Oversee open world and tutorial design and creation
  • Ensure world is populated with appropriate assets and gameplay
  • Create difficulty curve and progression in an open-world
  • Design and balance of arenas
  • Create and utilize LD pipelines
  • Serve as center of communication between disciplines

Individual Tasks Completed

  • Designed and helped build tutorial
  • Added juice (visual/auditory feedback) and polish to arenas
  • Built framework of world with bsp  and then modular terrain pieces
  • Populated parts of all theme sections with NPCs, gameplay bites, structures, props, and decoration
  • Worked with the game designer to design each part of the game

Open World Level Design

Scripting

Designing the level for an open world game is a challenging task that requires a lot of forethought and planning. I had level designers work in pairs to sketch initial map layouts. From there we took the best design and iterated on it a few times before taking the time to whitebox the world out in bsp. With it being an open world game, we decided that the biggest thing we wanted to focus on and accomplish was the player's ability to locate and orient themselves in the map. We sectioned areas of the park and planned landmarks and recognizable environment pieces with sightlines in mind so that a player would always be able to see multiple recognizable objects and locate themselves.
Getting the size of the map correct proved to be a more difficult task than we would have originally thought. The original plan for the map had 5 themes and was far larger than what is in the game now. We had many very early meetings with the design and art team about the world as we designed and built with bsp. To get the biggest but still complete map we could we could without killing our artists, we decided to cut the size of the map in half and reduce the number of themed sections from 5 to 3. Because this was in the first month of development we were able to stay on schedule, have little to no work go to waste, and dedicate more time to the remaining sections of the world.
Yellow signs mark placement and give instructions for minigames and gameplay bites.
We made the design decision early on that the player would be free to go where they wanted in the world without having to unlock something first. Without NPCs or text to tell the player all the possible things that they could do, I pushed for and helped design a visual language that the player could understand in the world. We created gameplay rules that had to be followed for consistency and conveyance. I wanted to make sure that the player would always recognize gameplay when they saw it and know how to find more of it. Things that a player learns and skills that they hone in one section of the game should be transferable to everywhere else in the world.​

Postmortem

What Went Right?
  • We cut features very early in development so those features were never missed and no man-hours were ever lost
  • Our team had extremely fluid and open communication which saved lots of time and confusion
  • Everybody was in some way able to put their ideas into the game which made everybody genuinely care about the game and want to make it successful
  • Early on we made gameplay rules, tools, and modular pieces that made repeated and customized use of assets extremely fast to place into the world
What Went Wrong?
  • Because the world is so big and there are so many varied things to do in the game which require different scripts and art assets, we had a ton of bugs and some areas didn't get as much love as they needed
What Was Learned?
  • As long as you supply players with fun tools that interact with the world, they can create more gameplay than the developers ever could
  • Even with all the landmarks in the world, players will still get lost at the beginning and require some time to get acquainted with the world
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