Code Alpha
Role: Level Designer
Location: University of South Wales (Online)
Team Size: 1
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About
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Code Alpha is a heavy narrative game where you play as a wolf pup called Storm. The game is a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi where Storm is estranged from his family and has to survive in a lonely world with the powers he inherits.
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This project, written by Ellie Marden, interested me due to the many challenges that occurred during the development process. This project has much potential because it is very different and unlike any other game I have seen before.
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Responsibilities
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1. Designing the level
2. Designing the Cinematic
3. Playtesting
4. Storyboarding
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Rough Concept of the Level
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1. Since the author had previously designed the level roughly, it was a good starting point for me to continue developing it.
2. It didn't take a very long time to set the level up as I used a Landscape asset called Brushify that was optimized, and I could also custom place landscape parts to give the scene more noise with hills and mountains.
3. I reused the level and incorporated the hunting, the pup following the bird from home; due to having such a large map, I thought about having a lot more gameplay in the level, but due to time constraints I decided to leave the project till here.
4. As you can see from below this was a before and after of what the cinematic sequence, the level and the gameplay after a little bit of tweaking looks like.
I used this video as a storyboard to guide me through the stages of designing the level and the cinematics.
This prototype was created by Ellie Marden who Code Alpha belongs to. She created this prototype to show the basic movement and understanding of the world in Code Alpha.
This was the final look at the level and how I could make a vast difference by changing the settings and tweaking the gameplay. Of course, everything needs a little bit more work but this was the final result.
Cinematics
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Designing the cinematic shots was a bit challenging as I had to make sure none of the UI or the characters overlapped or looked too bad on screen.
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I had an idea what I hoped to achieve and therefore placing the actors in the scene was quite easy and quick to do. I placed the primary subjects like the main wolf with the elements around its neck and the stags and the does in the middle of the camera to always give the players the idea that the stags are what they are aiming to hunt down.
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After that, I placed in the secondary subjects such as the wolves set 1 prowling slowly towards the stags and the wolves set 2 behind the main elemental wolf on top of the mountain. I realized that they were too far away and that the characters were too small so I enlarged them as much as it would be nice to look at from a further distance.
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Cinematics 2
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Possessing the cub after the first cinematic from the elemental wolf to the cub was challenging. It would mess up a lot or not change at all but after a few attempts, I got it working. For this part of the cinematic, I wanted this particular cub to be distant or have a look of distant gazing look. Looking at the storyboard that Ellie had done it was a very clear indication of what she wanted and who the first, second and third set of subjects be in the scene. The first set of characters were the cubs playing, Storm which is the cub looking outside of the cave.
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The second set of characters was the mother wolf and the phoenix in the distance. Having a very dark background was a bit of a killer because I realized after that the lighting had gone all wrong. I'll probably change that in the future but at the minute I had to make it work with the Phoenix being literally on fire for the player to see it from a mile away in the snow and rain.
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Cinematics 3
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Giving chase to the Phoenix and watching the pack return was a bit funny because I had problems attaching the animal to the mouth and to be honest makes it look like the elemental wolf has an awesome jaw power but it was trickier than I thought. So I had to get rid of the stag off the screen and have the wolf run and focus on rescuing the cub. This project taught me quite a lot of things about how to film the subject and how perspectives and different camera angles can more or less be beneficial and help you as a developer. Learning about the different methods and getting inspired from the storyboard video I was able to develop a scene and enhance the gameplay. I do wish to go back and fix the lighting and change and add bits here and there.
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