Introduction
Cloud Racers is a 3D-racing game where you drive through a futuristic city trying to beat your own time.
Contributions
- Scrum-Master
- Level Design
- Game Design
- Created Level 3 :
- Pre-Production
- Blockout
- Prototyping
- Balancing
- Lighting and Proping
- Playtesting
- Support on other levels
Specifications
- Created in 10 weeks half time
- Inhouse TGA-Engine
- Levels edited using Unity
Contributions
- Niklas Briselius(LD)
- Patrik Nilsson(LD)
- Oscar Blom(ART)
- Martin Vallin(ART)
- Niklas Hansson(ART)
- Patrik K.Hansson(PROG)
- Jonatan Svensson(PROG)
- Niklas Utterbäck(PROG)
- Olle Hagman(PROG)
- Björn Stenlund(PROG)
- Linus Axelsson(TA)
- Joakim Fridlund(TA)
Design Philosophy
We came into this project with a new group of people creating our first 3D game from scratch. My job was to Level design and also do game design. In the start, we looked at reference games that we could use for the game and we settled to do a racing game based on Star Citizens: Murray Cup. We decided to make a classic game with 3 laps and a timer and a speedometer. My task was to make the last Level where we wanted the player to present all skills that Level 1 and 2 taught.
Level Design
My idea to make the level a bit more hard than the other two was to put more focus on the vertical of the level. I wanted to make the player explore the 3D-environment in all axis. The result of the level was a level with a nice flow, it was some hard parts and turns in the level that I would've fixed if we had more time but overall there was nothing specific to complain about the level more than It needed more work.
STRUGGLES from First 3D group-project
The result of the game and the levels was that it was hard and the production in Unity and our Engine was quite struggling. I and my level design colleague were hyped from the start to finally implement our knowledge from unreal and unity from the previous year on The Game Assembly. There were some big hurdles that we had to jump over first and I think they slowed down the work processes for us level designers and the full group.
In this project, I would say that I was the person testing the pipeline to work. With artists and programmers doing a 3D project for the first time we had to solve the pipeline problem before building our levels. I made sure the models where the right scale according to how the engine worked and unity worked, and we had to change how this worked many times cause we found new problems with each new iteration of the engine.
In the end, we got the engine together and our technical artists made excellent tools to connect all disciplines.
Closing Thoughts
Like I said before this was the first time the group worked with 3D. We had some big issues with the design cause even if we did LDDs and had a nice design on paper we couldn't implement this design til there were 3 weeks left. So if I look at this project on how I worked as a designer it was hard, I think it was the most problematic project for the level designer. There were times that we couldn't do anything at all and where just waiting for the artists/programmers. Even though I feel like I didn't do much Level Design this project I feel like I grew as a group member and SCUM-master this project. I took on a leading part of the project to tie everyone in the group together and to keep everyone happy and positive even though the project was a struggle from time to time.
In the end, I feel proud that we managed to get out a nice playable game. My level design contribution in this project came out to be OK, my map was played and it was bug-free and had a nice flow. But with all the struggles in the project, I moved on more as a more confident group member.
