Veiled Viper

Unreal Engine

Work in Progress

Responsibilities:

Game Design and documentation.
Level Design and mechanic implementations
Lighting and sound - all music was found from Tabletop Audio and does not belong to me.

This project is a sci-fi themed level. The player takes control of Orion, a pilot tasked with infiltrating an alien space station and stopping their new weapon from being powered. It is a stealth mission with emphasis on using Orion's suit ability to blend in with the environment. This ability is used in tandem with his suit's AI - Kori - that accompanies him during this mission.

Return

I started with a basic map design in tandem with a walkthrough for my original design. However, I went back and forth on this design and how much I could actually build in a timely manner. In the end, this map was essentially redone as when I began building in Unreal Engine, I realized that my original top-down map didn't accurately depict the size of my level. Additionally, the way I was trying to incorporate height simply wasn't feasible. Thus, I finished building the level in Unreal engine and redid my top-down map after I had completed the layout.

I went on to utilize simple shapes to model out specific assets within the alien space station that Orion would be going through. It was a bit of a slow process, but I felt that for this project I wanted to showcase my eye for detail. Slowly, the halls began to fill with the assets that I created and saved in my folder to be reused in places throughout the level.

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Another design choice I made later on was near the end of the level. At first I had Orion utilize a ventilation shaft to get to the final area after being locked in a room with one of the enemies. This was a very simple fade to black and fade in with Orion at his end destination. Unfortunately, this didn't really work out as well as I wanted because it felt lacking. I decided I needed something else more engaging. So, I created an enemy bomb, sort of like a prototype of what Orion was there to stop anyway, on a smaller scale. Distracting the enemy and forcing the doors closed gives Orion the chance to blast open the other door and get to his objective. Besides, explosions are fun.

It took quite a while to get my mock stand-in enemies to patrol the halls the way I wanted them to. But I think it works well, especially in such a small space too. There were a lot of design elements that I had to really consider when it came to the enemies. One such element was if they could crawl through vents and such - taking a bit of inspiration from the Alien game. I ultimately decided against this though as I wanted these enemies to have a different feel to them in the sense of Orion possibly being detected and the mission failed. Yet, I wanted them to feel intelligent and so I created moments where they were alerted to certain events happening, such as locking down one of the doors after Orion enters the hall. Or chasing Orion when he enters a room.