Combat and level designer
Arena-based third-person melee mech combat
Pilot ICARUS, a cutting-edge combat mech, in a stylish third-person action game where you use your unmatched mobility and deadly combos to dominate battles on the ground and in the air.
Read the case studyCreating worlds has been part of my life since childhood. It started with games like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Warcraft III, and the many games I played with my siblings, cousins and friends. The joy of immersing myself in a different universe is what made me want to pursue game design.
While studying game design at Breda University of Applied Sciences, I discovered the beauty of level design. I love creating spaces and encounters that tie into the narrative and the worldbuilding, and shaping how a fight plays out inside them.
Outside of my work as a level designer, I let out my creative energy through music with my beatboxing, and through my Warhammer miniatures, which I paint and make stories for.
Arena-based third-person melee mech combat
Pilot ICARUS, a cutting-edge combat mech, in a stylish third-person action game where you use your unmatched mobility and deadly combos to dominate battles on the ground and in the air:
Problem 1
The first problem was restricting the player to the arena space. Players could fly and keep as much energy as they wanted by hitting enemies, which meant they could stay in the air indefinitely. The challenge was making sure the player felt free enough to move around the air, but constricted enough not to fight in just one spot, away from the main area. Getting there took multiple trials and errors.
First, looking at what sort of space was needed to accommodate a flying 3Cs was the most important aspect. This began by building arenas of different sizes and shapes, each quickly tested to see what worked and what didn't:
Problem 2
The second problem was making the physical shape of the arena interesting for the player, and making them use the verticality by fighting at both higher and lower altitudes.
The first iteration of the arena was made with platforms placed to quickly test the idea. At this point the project only had two types of enemies, one that flies towards the player and another that shoots but stays grounded. We also didn't have a proper spawning system, and with a combat system as complex as ICARUS, it was going to be difficult to test a good encounter with an interesting layout. So I went back to fundamentals and worked with primitive shapes: cubes, cones and circles. This simplified building and iterating on the layout, and let me focus the design thinking on the placement and size of the shapes and on enemy locations.
The main design principle throughout this challenge was dividing the combat space into low, middle and high stages, so the player has to switch between them to engage with the layout. From there, the arena was set up with platforms around a central pillar-like shape, which breaks line of sight from ranged enemies that could be on the other side. Placing grounded enemies at the different stages meant the player had to fly towards them and engage with the layout while juggling the melee enemies coming at them.
With the layout working much more effectively, later iterations improved the spacing of the shapes and shaped the waves so the player could not stay in one spot and kill enemies. Instead, they had to move between the shapes and from high to low stages to deal with and prioritise threats.
The challenge
The player abilities were confusing and required onboarding for the player to properly engage with the experience.
It took three iterations to get an onboarding that worked:
The final iteration of the onboarding level has the player practise movement mechanics: simple moving, jump/fly up, full throttle flight, and dash jumps, with a small parkour segment to practise the dash jumps. These are introduced step by step so the player can digest the different character abilities more easily. The dash jump is the most complicated, so I gave the player more time to learn it through a freeze frame and the parkour segment.
After the movement segment, the player meets the first enemy, which attacks from behind and activates another freeze frame that teaches the dodge and the perfect dodge mechanic. The player goes on to learn basic attacks and eliminates the enemy, which unlocks the next area, much lower down, to teach the ground slam, also through a freeze frame. The last area introduces the killzone, which the player can push enemies into to kill them, and the onboarding forces the player to perform actions that push enemies into it.
This version of the onboarding has been much more effective at teaching the mechanics of the game, thanks to all the errors and learnings I went through developing it.
[One sentence on what these show, for example the top-down layout next to the finished arena.]
Before
After
[One sentence on what these show, for example a wave table or a combat moment.]