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Heroes Park

Level Designer | Third person shooter

Summary

The scope of the project was to create an open world area for an action survival game. The first thing that I've done is to research a game similar to my scope, and I chose Days Gone. 

At first, I made a study of an area of the map "Marion Forks", highlighting all possible points of interest and how the player approaches and moves within the area. Then I created a zone taking into consideration what I studied previously from the analysis.

This projects was done for a work test.

Project Details

  • Project done in 1 week

  • Created using Unreal Engine 5

  • Focus on research and Open World Design

  • Softwares used:

    • Photoshop, Figma, Google Docs, UE5

  • No packs used, all assembled and created by me through modelling tools in UE5.

Overview

Pre production

Analysis

Before creating the concept for the map of Days Gone, I studied an area of the actual map, "Marion Forks". I analyzed:

  • Macro to Micro areas: 

    • ​How player approaches the area arriving from outside to inside

  • Landmarks:​

    • Main Landmark​

    • Micro Landmark

  • Environment storytelling:

    • ​Signs​​

    • Broken houses and cars

    • ecc..​​

  • Affordances

  • Shape language

    Check out the document:    ​​

Analysis document

toppng.com-freccia-nera-300x189.png

Area creation

Level Design Document

Research and brainstorm

During the phase of brainstorming I wanted to create something different from the environments pattern in Days gone, something that players can remember easily. In that period I was reading a manga named "I am a hero", and it has a neat place, a shopping center with a ferris wheel. I thought was cool and I was inspired from the ferris wheel, then I started searching for some environment with a ferris wheel and I found "Tibidabo", a mountain park in Barcellona.
After that I started taking references.

parc-d-atraccions-tibidabo.jpg
references.jpg
toppng.com-freccia-nera-300x189.png

Document Breakdown

Image to layout

Tibidabo was my main reference, then I decided to take a photo from the above of the park, study the territory and delimitate the macro area:

  • Gameplay area

  • Boundaries

  • Objectives

  • Landmarks

​

I've also written a short story of the area for better position buildings and boundaries

Asset list

I've written on Excel an asset list to better visualize what I wanted on the area of the map and to facilitate communication with art department (in order to simulate job)

immagine_2023-11-26_190200615.png

Macro to Micro

Decided where to place the gameplay area and boundaries, I defined the micro elements with some changes in the environment to hospitate better gameplay:

  • Access points

  • Interactables

  • Obstacles

  • Enemies

  • Outside/inside buildings

Layout inside building.gif

Player view

See on youtube

heroes park banner.jpg
oveview 2.jpg
oveview 3.jpg

Thoughts

I felt pretty inspired in this project and I am very satisfied with the final product.

But there are some touches about the map that I wanted to change:

  • Metrics of the buildings and truck

  • Boundaries of the map

    • The area has only 3 access points and it's not really open to the game map.​

After all was a very formative experience where I could learn how to better analyze and design an area of an Open World map

​

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