Topic
In my fifth semester, we were required to complete a project of our choosing in teams of 7 to 10 people. My team had 10 members, making us one of the larger groups. Since we all shared an interest in games and wanted to take this opportunity to try game development as a team, we decided to create the opening levels for an original game concept called Heart of Sylvan. But before I go into the details, please watch the trailer and walkthrough of the game.
Details
I want to talk a bit about the development process here, as well as my role in the project. I learned a lot from the challenges we faced, and I want to go over our approach in the sections below. If you're more interested in the game itself, check out this page. At the end, I'll also show some of our work-in-progress ideas and what we had planned for the game in the future.
My main responsibilities were project management, level design, and sound. To organize and track our work on the project, we used agile development, specifically a customized version of Scrum. We worked in two-week sprints that started with sprint planning and ended with a sprint review with our professors (our clients). We divided our 4-month development into three phases: Pre-production, Production, and Post-production. In Pre-production, we brainstormed ideas and decided on the game we wanted to make. We defined the project scope but didn't communicate the exact requirements from our clients early on, so we initially planned to create a full game with procedurally generated levels and a complete story. We soon realized this wasn't realistic with the time we had, and our professors weren't expecting a full game anyway. This led us to adjust our scope until we came up with something we were confident we could complete in three months and that would meet our clients' requirements: the first three levels of our game. As part of my reflection after the project, I created an overview of what an "optimal" pre-production process might have looked like for us.
In Production, we started developing workflows and pipelines (something we realized later we should have done in Pre-production too). Our team was divided into subteams that specialized in programming, 3D art, 2D art, level design, narrative, and sound. The level design team began by creating block-outs, which we tested with users and adjusted as needed. Then the 3D art team created assets for each level, and finally, the programmers implemented the mechanics. Meanwhile, the 2D art and narrative teams worked on the intro cutscenes, tutorials, and concept art for future levels. We met at the university every Wednesday and Friday to discuss the project, solve problems, and plan ahead. On Fridays, we held a mini-retrospective to reflect on our workflows and address any issues within the team. As I mentioned, in addition to management, I was also responsible for the level design of our game. I started with a rough sketch of how I wanted the room to be structured, then created a blockout in the engine (UE5). We iterated on the blockout until we arrived at the final levels you see below.
Post-production was all about adding sounds, polishing the game, and preparing it for Sichtraumfor Sichtraum, our university's semester-end showcase event.. During this phase, we decided to drop the third level we had started working on to focus on polishing the first two levels. Below, you can find some details about the third level, which is not displayed on the Sichtraum page.
Our third level was our first "boss fight", where players had to defeat the infestation blocking the door to the next room. This level is also where enemies appear for the first time.
To defeat the infestation, you had to crush three "hearts" connected to the main organism blocking the door. You do this by standing on pressure plates, which gradually raise pillars that were originally part of the temple's door mechanism.
Two of the pressure plates are in small side rooms that can be accessed by pulling levers to open the gates. The right room, however, is so badly infested that the lever is destroyed, but a hole in the wall has opened up, allowing the player to crouch through.
The hearts are positioned above the pillars, so raising them crushes the hearts. However, while you're on the pressure plates, enemies spawn continuously and try to push you off the platform.
For comparison, here are two early sketches I made for the level.