Full Gameplay
If you want a summary of what the game is and how I made this level in a friendly way, watch the video below.
If you want to know more details about the level, keep scrolling down, I'm sure you'll love learning about my entire level design process.
Overview
The Walking Dead Destinies is a third-person action-adventure experience, where you'll have a chance to rewrite the story of The Walking Dead as you know it, reliving the biggest moments from seasons 1-4 of the TV show.
In this project, I took on the role of Level Designer, so in the approximate period of 1 year and a half I was responsible for work in a team of 6 level designers throughout the project. Together we developed a total amount of 23 levels 3D.
Throughout the project, I worked on creating 7 levels from the beginning and I was involved in the balancing, bug fixing and implementation of systems of all levels in the game.
The most important regions of the series that I worked on were The Hospital, Woodbury and The Prison.
LEVEL NAME: Made To Suffer - Woodbury
DURATION: 3 months
SOFTWARES USED: Unity & Draw.io & Unity Pro Builder
Search and Moodboard
When starting any level, I always do some case research, looking for image references from known locations that have something to do with the mood and aesthetics of the level I'm creating. In this The Walking Dead project, I was also able to study in depth the series itself that exists, watching and studying the specific episodes that appeared in Woodbury locations that would be useful for us to use as a reference for this level.
Furthermore, I create a Moodboad, with several images, in this case, images taken from the series and images I found on the internet too, so that we have a large "image bank" to use as a reference, not only for the creation of the prototype as well, as to help the 3D Environment team build the entire artistic aesthetic of what the level will actually look like.
I used some of these reference images again to create the level's Blueprint, so you can see some of these references in the next section below.
Bubble Diagram &
Walkthrough
After creating the Moodboard and understanding even more how the narrative of the level I am creating will work, I go to the next step of creating the Bubble Diagram.
At this stage, the idea is to create bubbles that represent the general areas or "objectives" that the player will have throughout the level, from the beginning to the end. It is important to report whether any cutscene/cinematic will occur between one bubble or another, and it is also important to highlight which character the player will be controlling, if your game has more than one playable character.
In this level of the game The Walking Dead Destinies, we will control the character Michonne, after being introduced to the city in the previous level. However, Michonne still has some distrust of the Governor and wants to recover her Katana at all costs.
With this as the main objective, I started thinking about the variables that would make this idea cool. For this, I would have Michonne start close to the Hotel where she was left to sleep at night by the Governor. Michonne leaves this Hotel and starts walking around the city and she knows that the Governor's house (mansion) is where her Katana is located, so the player must find a way to enter the house and retrieve her weapon.
After setting an initial idea (which I will discuss more with you in the next step below), I finalized the Bubble Diagram and began to unravel the entire narrative of each area (Bubble) in the level's Level Design Document, creating the Walkthrough stage, where we provide as much detail as possible for each area, so that it is easier to create the level's Blueprint.
Final Bubble Diagram
Bubble Diagram revised and adjusted in areas to visually reduce the true number of areas.
Blueprint (top down map)
After finishing the Bubble Diagram and the Walkthrough, we on the Level Design team had the idea of creating a different Blueprint. Instead of creating a direct Blueprint in a 2D Top Down view on "paper", we decided to apply everything in a quick 3D Blueprint directly on the Engine, so that we could only visualize the floor, walls and some small details such as cars and obstacles in the scene for the player. (you can see this 3D Blueprint in the first image to the side)
With this idea, we were able to perform a simple blockout that already greatly advanced our creation of the final level's White Blocking.
An important point of this level, and what made me spend a lot of time producing this level, was that it shares the same location and environment with 3 other levels as well. Because practically 1 entire act of the game takes place only in Woodbury.
The Woodbury Problem
As I mentioned above, this level is part of the same act of the game that takes place only in Woodbury. Above, there are 4 levels that take place in the same environment as the closed city of Woodbury. With that in mind, I had to create a city that would accommodate the missions of the 4 levels that we would create for the game. They would have few changes from one to another, such as areas that can only be accessed on 1 level, different lighting and changing the position of assets.
Playable Area
Level 15: Walk With Me
Playable Area
Level 17: Hounded
Playable Area
Level 16: Made to Suffer
Playable Area
Level 19.1: Walker Pit (Boss Fight)
Level 19.2: Suicide King
Playable Area
As you can see in the images above, I had to very segmentally divide the areas that the player would interact with each level of Woodbury. Because it was a large level, it used the game's memory a lot, so optimization was a very important step for this. As we were aware of which locations would be playable in each level of the game, all the other areas that were not playable and did not appear visibly to the player, we tried to clean up as much as possible, to save memory and have a really good performance, even in levels with more playable areas.
White Blocking
Continuing with the Made to Suffer level blockout, after quickly doing the 3D Blueprint, I was able to start adding more details to the white blocking in general. I added basic lighting for the scene's mood, painting on some blocks to differentiate key points from normal assets and started to detail some things like small trees/vegetation, ramps, stairs and things like that.
Furthermore, I started adding some basic systems to be able to test the player's movement, Points of Interest cameras, to try to better guide the player to a certain location, basic enemies and the item collection system, as this was an important point in creating this level.
After carrying out these basic creations of the scenario in general, it was time to test one of the things that I most loved implementing in this level, which was Stealth.
In The Walking Dead Destinies, I can say that this is one of the levels where Stealth was most successful, not only because the character was unarmed, but also because we were facing human enemies who had a slightly more intelligent AI.
In this level, the main point is that the character Michonne must invade the Governor's mansion to rescue her Katana. However, she must do this by going to the back of the garden of this house, which is closed. To open it, the player must find a tool that opens this gate, and this tool is found in another location in the city that has a Workshop supplies protected as it is a location for the Governor's guards. In the video above, we can see a test that I did directly in Blocking, to see if the Stealth works in that area I created to collect the tool.
Another Stealth test that I did was at the bottom of this Workshop Supplies, where if the player were to explore the location, he could be rewarded with a high number of Skill Points, points that could be used to improve the characters' skills.
Golf reference from the TV Show.
Another very fun test was from the video above, where after collecting the item needed to open the gate, the player can walk over one of the city's barriers and see an Easter Egg from the series, where the Governor threw golf balls for on the fence in the Walkers. But beyond this reference, it is possible to pick up bottles and throw them at the Walkers, making them go crazy with the sounds made by the bottles and seeing a very funny scene when playing with them.
Creating this level, I needed to make the player cross one side of the city, to be able to collect the item needed to open the gate. However, to do this in an intriguing way by exploring the location, it was necessary to make the player walk through a location outside the city's barriers. A part of a street that was totally dirty and full of Walkers, unlike the inner city of Woodbury which was protected, safe and clean.
The Walking Dead Destinies - Woodbury Garden
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Reference
Last but not least, after the player collects the tool needed to open the gate, he has access to the garden of the player's mansion, where there are some guards that you need to pass in Stealth to avoid them to discreetly enter the mansion. A reference that I used in a very interesting way was the guards of a specific castle in Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.
Systems
At this level I didn't participate much in the production of the Prop Placement because I had to rush to start the production of another level, so, after delivering the documentation to the 3D Environment team, they started the Prop Placement of the level and I returned to work on it in the systems implementation part.
Receiving the level back from the 3D Environment team, I was responsible for implementing and positioning several enemies and resources that are present in the final Made to Suffer level, like:
• Skill Points;
• Points of Interest;
• Objectives;
• Enemies (Walkers and Humans);
• FootSteps for the enemies;
• Predefined path for enemies to walk;
• System for activating and deactivating cutscenes/cinematics;
• Checkpoints;
• Among other things.
After completing the implementation of all systems, the level reached a maintenance stage, where we avoided adding more features to the level and only took care of bug fixing and visual improvements.
Conclusion
This is one of the levels that I am most proud of in this project, as it was a level that I could use my creativity very well based on the main information from the story brought by the team.
This was a level that was almost cut from the game, but I managed to defend the idea of the level and as I had already done a well-defined White Blocking with excellent gameplay, I convinced my P.O and design leader to keep the level within the game.
This level undoubtedly demanded a lot of my attention but that is gratifying to look at with its final result and how it fits very well with the city and the other levels of Woodbury, even though they have different layouts and gameplays.
