Level Design

This is a game level that I made for the Game Level Design unit. The task was to design a game level that challenges the players while also being visually appealing and engaging. I used Unity to build the level.

The level consists of an island, surrounded by sea water, and where an ancient temple is located. The terrain is mainly rocks and cliffs and has partially patches of sandy beaches. The vegetation is tropical with rainforest covering most of the island and palm trees in the vicinity of the beaches.

The temple stands on the highest point of the island and, to get there, the player must search for the optimal route. The area surrounding the temple hides multiple stone ruins, pillars, stone arches, and old stairways. There are various pathways throughout the level, some of them are critical (the player will have to use some of them to reach checkpoints) and some alternative ones. There are areas on the island that the players can explore and where they can find hidden collectible items.

All the assets that I used in the final level are my own (except the big rocks and foliage, which are from unity assets store). The workflow I usually use is modelling in Maya -> sculpting in ZBrush (where needed) -> high-poly and low-poly models ->  UVs for the low-poly models -> texturing in Substance Painter.

Lighting and other post process volumes play an important role in the environment. For this project I used a directional light setup with realtime mode. To create the mood of a nice and calm sunny day, I set the temperature to Direct Sunlight and intensity mode to High Sun. To create the effect of sun rays I added a Sky and Fog volume to the scene, enabled volumetric lighting and increased the multiplier to value of 2. This effect of light rays is also used in different areas to guide the player towards areas or points of interest and also help create an immersive realistic experience.

A post-process volume has also been added to the scene. This component was set to global, a mode that has no boundaries and it is applied to the whole scene. The effects that were added to the stack are:

• Exposure - auto mode was used, that simulates how the human eye adjusts to changes in brightness in real time.

• Tonemapping - set to ACES and has a greater effect on colour hue and saturation. It also provides a more film-like appearance.

• Ambient Occlusion - calculates points in the scene that are exposed to ambient lighting and darken the areas that are hidden from the ambient light (such as creases, holes, or spaces between objects that are close together).

• Bloom - to add a little glow effect to brighter areas.

• Colour adjustments - to increase the contrast and saturation in the scene.