Odyssey
LEVEL DESIGN
A 7 week project done in Unreal engine during a game project at Futuregames 2021
ABOUt this project
Odyssey is a turn based strategy game that takes place on a space ship. The ships AI has gone rouge, and the player must fight off robots around the ship in order to turn it off. I was in charge of designing the games level.
MY goals
Design a level where the player can choose if they want to focus on stealth or combat
Create interesting rooms where the player could move around easily
Create the feeling of the space ship being huge
level design process
finding inspiration
Except from being a strategy game, part of the assignment was to take inspiration from a movie director. My team chose Stanley Kubrick and the movie "2001, A Space Odyssey".
When designing a level I like to look for inspiration in unexpected places, and for this project I looked at baroque gardens. I wanted to create a big space, with smaller rooms, where the layout was made particularly with human movement in mind. Below are two examples.
Sketch of "The Château de Marly"
Daniel Marot "Garden Fashioned as a Labyrinth"
Paper design
I created a lot of sketches of rooms and maps for this level, and wrote down what kind of functions I wanted them to have. I thought a lot about the players progression when designing, and how I was gonna teach the player out mechanics. You can see some of the sketches here:
finished version
Here is a final and dressed version of the level. The player starts on the left side.