Tanis

Unreal Engine

Work in Progress

Responsibilities:

Game Design and documentation.
Level Design and mechanic implementations
Lighting and sound - music was found from Tabletop Audio and Freesound. None of the music belongs to me.

Tanis is a fantasy work in progress. The original idea was closer to something like World of Warcraft where the player would run around and gather up quests from NPC's in town. Then the player would leave the town briefly to go finish those quests by finding what was asked of them and then bring it back to that NPC. The idea has since changed and is taking a new perspective, one centered on a more JRPG style of game play and influenced by Honkai Star Rail, while still keeping the fantasy elements.

Return

The Tanis Hub Level is meant to embody a place that a player can return to often. Places like Stormwind in World of Warcraft, or Sumeru in Genshin Impact. It's meant to be a living city and where the player can interact with certain NPCs to deal in trade or even to get new information and maybe even new quests. Still, I ran into a handful of issues while building this level. The first being that I unfortunately built it too large. At the time, my old computer was having a bit of a rough patch, and I didn't have access to my drawing tablet. Which made making a detailed map rather difficult. Not that I'm great at building maps to begin with as it takes at least two tries to get it close to right. Though my map didn't see a reiteration, unfortunately, the level design in engine did. A couple of times honestly. But the main premise of the story remained: explore the city and in so doing, help some of the citizens.

1/1

While working on the map, I knew I wanted a river to run through it, but I wasn't entirely sure how. Did it run directly through the center? Was it off to the side? Was it beyond the walls and just nearby? As I was working on the level in engine, I finally settled on this idea that it would be really cool to have this river split the town, with one side being raised a little higher than the other. It would help give elevation and make the area all the more unique to look at and explore. After working in engine, I went back and refined the map to better fit the design I was going with.

Despite liking this idea of one side of the village being raised up as if a quake had split it in two, I just couldn't work in a good-looking bridge in the amount of time I had to create this. So, I decided to level out each side, kept the river, and instead built smaller raised areas that eventually led to having an upper section of the town directly over the water. From here, I felt rather inspired, and the design work of the little town came together a lot quicker.

I took the opportunity to really dig into designing what the "cavern" area would look like that goes underneath the upper section of Tanise. Hanging stalactites fill the underneath and to enhance it further, I created a set of hanging lanterns to light the way across the bridge. Up top, I created a giant water wheel and a overlook to go with it. Other than the bridge beneath the overpass, this section of the town is my favorite. The water wheel took quite a lot of work though. I struggled to get it to turn properly and fought with the sequencer a lot. It was the last item to get working, and even then it wasn't entirely perfect.