Level Design
With a critical eye for layouts, art, and visual clarity, I take my levels from initial 2D concepts to the final stages of polish. I'm a level designer and scripter that excels at iterating on concepts.
Level Design for Recurrent
Initial Design
When designing Recurrent levels, I was fortunate to have Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause as a basis for understanding how time travel would work in a first-person shooter setting. During my initial research, I found that the designers at Respawn chose to build both versions of the level directly on top of one another. As I began to draft level blockouts for Recurrent, I understood exactly why.
Respawn had taken the player's golden path and split it between two "past" and "present" versions of the level. Although aesthetically these levels looked significantly different, with the present being overgrown and the past being intact, the geometry of these levels was almost exactly the same.
The differences in geometry between the past and present in Effect and Cause were always telegraphed to the player. A glass platform would be introduced in a safe environment as being broken in the present and intact in the past. From then on, the player would recognize glass as a material that was likely to "change" when jumping between the past and present.
Level Prototypes
Practice and failure are the best teachers. I iterated on 3 different variations of the tutorial for Recurrent. My earliest concepts were just trying to recreate the magic of Effect and Cause. Even in 2D layouts, I realized that there would be a lot of trouble for the player to navigate a level environment they were actively time-traveling through.
What happens if you time travel and would be in a wall in the other timeline? Do we damage the player? Kill them outright? Not let them use their ability?
This was a serious design challenge of the project. Besides needing to incentivize the player to utilize their time travel ability, the environments needed to still function as FPS arenas. This meant that serious changes in level geometry would be incredibly frustrating for the player as they would, regardless of what time travel solution I went with, be punished for interacting with a core gameplay mechanic.
This also explained why the past and present would have to be build on top of one another! The core architecture of environments needed to stay the same with only a few key areas changing.
Ice and Thawed
There were many iterations of past and present game mechanics that I'm still excited to explore. But for the prototype, I remembered the glass from Effect and Cause.
Iterating on this concept, I landed on having the present frozen and the past thawed out. Like glass, players would learn to look out for water turning to ice and vice versa as they travel between timelines. It would also have a major aesthetic difference that would let the player easily tell whether they were in the past or the present. I started to get excited about the interesting level design opportunities:
- Water in the past could act as a platform in the present
- Water could be moved in the past and act as a new platform or obstacle in the present
- Ice in the present could block the player's path but not be an obstruction in the past
This ended up being the most feasible early time travel mechanic to base the level around. And I had a lot of fun creating the shader for the water and ice!