Scrapper's Valley
3rd Person Open-world
Introduction
My main goal for this open-world level is to create a environment that feels narratively lived-in and one that excites the player to explore.
The gameplay will be relaxed and focus solely on one mission for demonstration purposes.
However, as a secondary goal, I want to establish hints at future areas to explore along the main path of the player.
Project Details
Programs used
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Unreal Engine 5.2
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Blender
Development time:
3 weeks half time/estimated 60h
Focus areas: Level design, Enviromental design
Base template used for gameplay: IWALS v.3.0.2 by JAKUB https://www.patreon.com/JakubW
Interactive Stylized Lowpoly Grass by Nils Arenz on Epic store
You crest over the gentle hill and round a corner. Soon you'll be in the town and new adventures await in this lush post-apocalyptic wonderland.
Overview
Process
Pre production
Selling a mood
My main focus for this level was to sell a mood to the player.
The story I came up with centered around a lush post-apocalyptic world, far in the future where nature had reclaimed the previous city ruins and created a new environment.
The survivors have now settled on top of the ruins and live out their life farming, scrapping or as for the player character, traveling the world as a deliveryman.
Some of my biggest inspirations for this were games like Horizon: zero dawn, Sable, Journey and, of course studio Ghibli's Nausicaä of the valley of the wind.
The overgrown ruin parts of Horizon: Zero Dawn was a huge inspiration
Concept art from Nausicaä of the valley of the wind
Champs bleu by sparth on Artstation
Structuring references
I had previously gathered a rather extensive board of inspirations on Pinterest.
Using Miro, I could better organize them and make quick notes of specific things I wanted to take from an image or where it would belong in the game.
Testing out a layout and placing references for their themes
Choosing a template
Since I imagine the player character as an explorer and deliveryman and I wanted to focus more on the world than gameplay, I began looking at existing templates.
I decided on the popular IWALS template, due to its advanced movement system and integrated vehicle.
Climbing mechanics in IWALS by JAKUB
Creating a vehicle
Even though IWALS has a working vehicle, I wanted the player to have a custom vehicle that reflected their character's lifestyle and the world they live in.
The last part of my pre-production stage was to tinker with IWALS vehicle and adapt it into my own hover scooter that I sculpted using Blender.
The scooter from blender, to Blueprint to in game.
Blockout & Whitebox
World Scaling
This level was originally created for another assignment, but I thought the world that I established had an interesting premise and lent itself perfectly for me to continue developing.
However, my biggest concern was that its current scale was too large for me to create what I wanted to present out of it. My solution to this was to scale down and shrink the footprint of the level.
To balance during the blockout, I chose an area that I found was too large or took too much time to traverse and condensed it, asked for feedback on it and then iterated on based on the received feedback.
The playable area shrunk to about half of the original size.
What is the uneasiest way to enter a giant robot?
Giant position
In the original level, the giant was leaned against a waterfall.
I decided to move the giant closer to the player, letting it take more of a center stage in the level as the main point of interest.
Its posing and position changed a couple of times during the blockout, since I wanted to maximize on the macabre feeling of the people scavenging parts like old whalers.
I eventually settled on entering through the mouth.
Key challenges
Two of the more noteworthy challenges appeared during feedback and testing in blockout. Both were distantly related to each other and could be solved with some clever iteration.
The first challenge centered on the level. It had started feeling less like an open-world experience and more like the player was moving along a track until they appeared at their destination.
I solved this by breaking up travel, adding areas where the player couldn't use their hover scooter to progress and instead had to dismount to solve the encounter.
The encounter could be either a puzzle to unlock a path forward or an NPC interaction.
Puzzle where the player had to dismount, move the "boxes" and open the way
The second challenge concerned gameplay and visual fatigue. Some of the roads the player traveled or areas they visited took too long and lowered the enjoyment of the gameplay.
To solve this, I shortened the roads that became too tedious to travel on and added more variations in the environments for the player to view.
Showing topdown of the old path and how it changed to reduce fatigue.
Cutting areas
I originally planned to have a whole section inside the giant that would feature a lot of climbing, jumping and other interactions illogical spaces. However, due to time constraints, I had to cut it down and the reworked area ended just at the back of the giants "throat", where the player would fall down and gain access to the underground that would be the next area after this level.
Breathing life into environment
The last part of my process, during the whitebox, was to breathe some life into the level by going over areas such as the village, broken elevator and scrapping site with a decoration pass.
I added some blockout NPCs, placed houses and replaced placeholder assets with more refined versions.
NPCs as a conceiled barrier to stop player from driving off a ledge.
Multi-use assets
During both the blockout and whitebox I managed to create a lot on a smaller list of assets. Some I could lift from other projects, like the tents, blockout NPCs or house roofs.
Others that I created and weren't standard blocks in Unreal, I tried to make sure I could use them in different scales and combinations to make something new with them.
Doing this meant I didn't have to spend a ton of time creating new assets, but could instead spend that time filling out the world.
The Skyscraper block was very versitile by both being strechable and easy to combine with standard blocks to form new silhuettes in short time.
Design Highlights
Look at that place please!
I wanted to feed the player's curiosity and want to know more about the world.
One way I did so, was to place vistas around areas that the player would naturally have to move a little bit slower around.
My hope was that the player would want to find a way to visit the area and try to find a way over there by exploring the environment more.
The tunnel frames the vista below the village.
Sightlines and reveals
Early on, I had established one short and one long term goal in the level for the player to take interest in and be able to use as landmarks when navigating.
Different points where sightlines were placed
It helped keeping track on sightlines when editing the landscape.
The first was the village and, more specifically, the tower, which was added to help it stand out more in the landscape.
The player would see immediately after cresting the first hill and, if that didn't help, I imagined that they would want to visit, by obligation of a mission from the previous area before this level.
The tower is the highest point for the player after they crest over the hill.
The second and long term goal, the giant.
I tried creating a soft reveal by setting up key sightlines where I could "milk" the view as much as possible.
My hopes for this was that the player would gradually realize the massive scale of the giant that they are slowly approaching.
As the player gets closer and closer, they start to realize really how big the giant is.
Reflection
Building this level has been a challenge in how much I can manage to condense an open-world area in order to sell a proof of concept.
necessaryIn this project, I feel I have learned to become better when and where it's necessary to cut corners and content without sacrificing too much quality, as became apparent during the latter weeks of this project. Additionally, it also spurred me to learn how to optimize the areas I had already created.
In the end, I believe the level and I are better for that and if I had kept the original size, the level would have felt emptier and not as interesting as the one I ended up with.
Thank you for taking the time to read.