Introduction

Ulv is an RPG-Hack And Slash game where the player needs to fight their way through waves of enemies in an underground church. The gameplay consists of combat versus waves of enemies while traversing through a Linear Level Design filled with a lot of unique events. The player has 4 abilities that need to be adapted to the enemies to keep Ulv alive and to kill your enemies. 

The right scope

With some issues of the previous game Cloud Racers, we had to do some changes to the scope of the project, starting from basics and iterating in a more restricted way than we did with Cloud Racers. Early from the start, we decided that I should make the basic Game Design and Gameplay iterations and move it to a task force discussing it. So I did a power point regarding what kind of enemies we could have what attacks and abilities we could have and as a group, we iterated on this and came to a conclusion that is close to what the game looked when it was finished.
This made us move to a state that we had the gameplay setup, the level designers including me knew what we were doing and also the rest of the group. This was making our pre-production run more smooth and balancing our project the first 2 weeks. 
For me the Level Design was from the start also a low scope, both I and my colleague wanted to just make 2-3 linear levels without any events from the start. Making it a smooth and fun game experience. But as the project went on and developed we also started to add level specific events and fun secrets and detours for the player.

Keeping a Level interesting

I've spent a lot of hours playing the Diablo games and with my mindset to the type of HackNSlash game we where about to do there where some big challenges, the loop of the game itself is repetitive, the thing that keeps the player active is either loot or leveling up and since we where scoping low for this game this was not an alternative for the level designers when we where designing our levels - this was a challenge for us to create a level design that was immersive without any help from loot and player progression, we had to work with level progression in a new way. 

We managed this in two ways:

• First me and my colleague decided to work more close making the game feel more like the player was doing a progression than just running through three levels. We designed levels that complemented each other and in someway had the same way of thinking and designing.  A lot of help we had with this was that our structure of the game was set early and already in pre-production we knew what we had to work with. 
• The second was that we asked the programmers to help us implement scripted events that would make the level feel more alive and give it more of a purpose. In the last two weeks, we had the support for scripted events and it was my task to take care of these tasks. So I created some level specific events that also supported the progressions of the levels. 

Closing Thoughts

This was one of the best games I've been a part of making at the Game Assembly, we got the best possible grade on the project and we were all very happy with the results. The reason this project was good for me was that this was the first time that I got to decide the gameplay-features, I got to decide the scripted events and the work on the levels was very smooth. When we got the grade, in the end, I was not surprised cause as a group we learnt from the previous project to not overscope and to get every member to always have something to work with.