About the game and its development conditions
Kari started out as a resource management concept which later took the form of an exploration/adventure experience set in a world where the titular character must gather and craft items while avoiding hazards in order to escape an island governed by gods inspired by norse mythology.
As a school project at BUas, the project took place in four development blocks of 2 months each, with the following structure:
Concepting. Envisioning a project and finding proof to support its successful development given the parameters set by us and stakeholders.
Pre-Production. Designing and building tools, game systems and assets to make ready for:
Production. Realizing plans of previous blocks by building the actual content of the game in Unreal Engine 4.
Release. Continue and finish work from the production stage before releasing the game on Steam, and provide additional post-release support.
My role and contributions
Level Design
My main role during development was that of level designer. I was also part of designing the core concept of the game along with the rest of the team. During development I was foremost responsible for the Forest and Mountain levels of the game, but contributed to every level at one point or another.
Early responsibilities during the concepting stage consisted of exploring level metrics and scope for the final project. My process for this included researching similar games, prototyping environments, and working closely with other discplines (tech design for player movement, artists for scope and level structure needs).
Pre-production and production stages included blocking out levels, set dressing, gameplay implementation, level design iterations, player progression iterations (more information on these topics below).
During the final release and post-release stages my main tasks were level-related bug fixing and blocking volume iterations, in addition to further player progression adjustments.
Technical Design
During pre-production, I was in addition to level design tasked with (re)designing hazard concepts and creating prototypes for some of them in collaboration with the technical designers on the team. During this process I was able to grow my skills at blueprinting in Unreal Engine and had the opportunity to work with artists in a, for me, new capacity when realizing these prototypes in-engine.
Set Dressing
Development at times had dependency issues where level design was slightly ahead of gameplay and art asset creation. During these bottlenecks level designers were tasked with doing initial set dressing for all levels except the final one.
My first attemps at set dressing were of acceptable standard to artists in the team, with the understanding that all set dressing was subject to change upon more asset creation and artists having time to do further passes. I improved noticeably after receiving suggestions on how to cluster objects in a more natural manner. Results of set dressing the Forest level can be seen in (Image 5) (assets courtesy of Team Unmanageable’s artists).
Late in the development phase, just before release, the second level (Mountain) was behind in terms of set dressing, again letting me improve this skill by implementing initial set dressing to take pressure off artists. The results of my set dressing in the Mountain level can be seen in (Image 6).