Summary of the project
Styx project was an Level Design exercice aimed to train us into quest making and blocking out by using our teacher’s made assets. He set up a Styx lookalike unreal project with the basic movements, camera, dialogues and AI movement behavior. We had to creates events and quest following a theme. I decided to make a level inspired by the “Panopticon design”.
My pitch : “As Styx finally flees through the human gold mine, he falls face to face with an orc camp and is taken to the orcs’ lair… a former prison ravaged by the green horde. He has to find a way to escape from there. However, They are still orcs, trying to kill them with your dagger is not conceivable.“
- Level Designer and programmer
- It’s a student level design project
- Developed in 2 weeks
- Used Unreal
- I was solo on this project
Play our game here !
Panopticon : My inspiration for the level
Orcs invaded prison
My work as Level Designer and Programmer
I had a lot of fun with the tools I had at my disposal and created a whole narrated level with a lot of environmental narration telling the player what happened in this prison. I then cut my mission in steps :
- Escape your cell
- Avoid the orc sight
- Get to the 3rd floor
- Optional : Get the second floor key
- Optional : Open the door to the 3rd floor
- Find a way to the chief desk on the 4th floor
- Optional : Talk to Jhunky
- Get Jhunky some forbidden “boomsticks”.
- Lead Jhunky to the 3rd floor bridge
- Blow up the 3rd floor bridge door
- Optional : Talk to Jhunky
- Find plans of the prison
- Optional : Talk to Knurf, the slave of the gold room
- Optional : Kill Knurf
- Optional : Sneak behind Knurf
- Optional : Get some of the loot
- Find the safe containing the rune in the 1st floor
- Get the safe open
- Optional : (if Jhunky found) Blow up the safe
- Optional : Cut the rope holding boxes to fall onto the safe
- Optional : Steal the combination on the chief belt.
- Go see the chief on the 4th floor
- Steal the combination
- Get the Rune
- Find a way to kill or distract orcs in front of the exit
- Cut the rope of the first floor corpse effigy
- Escape through the magically sealed door
*Bold objectives being mandatory ones to progress
I went on illustrator to start making the layout of my Panopticon prison. The black line is the main path I planned for the player, red dotted lines are guard paths and stars are guards.
My job as a programmer was to consider opportunities around the main path with character dialogues and guard patrols. The idea in stealth is always to have at least 2 angles to a problem. My goal was to create a level with enough holes, paths and dialogue hints to give the player the motivation to explore and try different paths.
The other goal with this Level design and Narrative design was to show that I can make levels with replayability while keeping the coherence of a “functional and believable” environment. That means that it feels and could function like a prison, with an architecture that makes sense.
I used the blueprint system of Unreal and even customized some of my teacher’s blueprints to suit my path’s logic. The level can be played in any direction, I implemented short-circuits that skip objectives if you went further than the active one. If you find the safe before going to the 4th floor, you skip the entire level and can finish it in 4 objectives ! Can you find out how ?
This was the first big success of my year, I discovered the world of environmental story telling and I loved it. My teacher Clément Demaret was a huge support and as a Senior Level Designer at Cyanide, he really inspired me. I love stealth games and being able to create my own Styx mission was amazing. I am planning on continuing Level design and I also started making Level art for Inktober.