About the project
Homelands is a 3D platformer which I developed for my Final Year Project at Staffordshire University. The player takes control of Tempa an excitable adventurer who is looking to explore the world by herself, but it has been tainted by the evil skeleton crew. Players can experience what it’s like to have the ability to pull off awesome jumps, navigate around dangerous hazards, fight enemies and collect all the lost treasure of the homelands. It is a level design project that was made to showcase and broaden my level design skills and was awesome to create because I got a taste of what a full development period would consist of. The main goal of this project was to create a stylized platformer that offered a fresh look on this genre all while keeping true to its iconic traits. This chapter is based on a town/temple theme and serves as the second level in the Homelands project. Tempa will encounter some deadly traps and how they are overcome is upto the player . Then a highrise dash round and through buildings sees Tempa try her best to avoid the lava whilst trying to reach the mystical temple.
My roles and responsibilities
Designing the core movement and mechanics for Tempa
Creating the traps/hazards and their behaviours
Designing and creating the pickups within the level
Blocking out levels in 3DS max for playtesting in UE4
Using block outs as a planning tool for enemy, pickup and trap placement all while thinking about player flow and pace of the level
Critically thinking about level flow, pace and the players experience
Using affordances and semiotics to assist the player
Designing and implementing low level enemy AI which guards and attacks the player
Reflecting on how I can use clichés and real world symbols or structure to assist players
Documenting my progress on official Staffordshire University Forum
Constant iteration on the levels to achieve the best final product
Conducting playtesting sessions to refine and improve gameplay
Creating complex levels using the Terrain tool
Basic sound that’s implemented in level
Basic UI design and implementation
Basic principles of animation in Unreal Engine 4 such as rigging, retargeting and creating state machines on the animation graph