ROLE: Designer

Platform: PC | Engine: Unreal 4 | Duration: 23 weeks | Team: 13

Lanterns is a third person action-adventure game where players control a lantern-bearing knight. Come together to overcome the creatures lurking in the darkness and bring back the light.

Level design

When I joined the team, my role became primarily a level designer. I paper prototyped the layout of the world and implemented alterations with the Unreal Terrain Editor, in addition to prototyping the Woods and an unused maze area.

Images brightened for visibility.

The Woods

The Woods area is the first where players are separated after meeting others in the tutorial. Originally meant as a sprawling, confusing wilderness, we shrunk the area due to scope. However, in testing this still tended to give new players several minutes of exploration alone before coming into contact with another player again--sometimes even longer.

In order to help players with navigation, I set the terrain surrounding our main dungeon (the Temple) much lower, giving players almost anywhere in the Woods a point on the horizon to aim for--the glowing crystal at the top of the Temple. Paths were dented into the ground using the terrain editor, helping players find direction guides besides just gaps between trees. The paths converge at the base of the Temple's hill; most players go up this hill in small groups and jump across the river here. Past this hill is a collapsed ruin, meant for groups less than three that can't make the jump to still be able to cross. I also used small crops of luminescent mushrooms to guide players forward from their spawn points. These mushrooms light up when a player's light shines on them, and when clustered with others, can light each other, making a pulsing trail.

The Slums

I also concepted and white-boxed a maze area known as the Slums that was dropped early for scope. This maze is in two perfectly reflected halves. It was to use the Best Friend enemy (concept picture above), which was meant to replicate the movement and behavior of a player, luring real players away from friends and into danger. The reflection of the maze would allow us to take the control input of the player in the opposite side of the maze and reflect it, replicating advanced AI without needing the difficult programming. Players would reach the end of the maze in a small room where the enemies would be revealed and a boss fight would ensue. Preliminary testing took a developer familiar with the area about 3 minutes to get across, while unfamiliar players ranged from 3-10 minutes.

Currently the white-boxed level enjoys a quiet retirement in the background of the completed Lanterns game, lending its silhouette to the horizon between the Library and the City.

The Galaxy

This room was originally designed to fit in a tower space outside the Temple, but was moved to the inside of the bronze doors to streamline the player's experience. I brought the whiteboxed platforms into the new space, retrofitted them for the new space, and frequently playtested to ensure that gaps the players had to jump were appropriately sized for our target team sizes and available power-ups.

Later, I replaced the rectangular platforms with meshes already being used in the Main Hall of our Temple, and replaced the materials with shiny, emissive ones, giving the space a more ethereal look to it. I made the walls and floor of this room much darker to better contrast against these platforms. I also replaced the circular platforms with their new materials, specially designed to match our "galaxy" look.

I fine-tuned enemy encounters here, as early testing showed the spawn rate of Shadow enemies could easily overwhelm small parties in such a short time frame that it was difficult for other players to come to their aid. I also adjusted the number of light bits--a collectable that gives individual players special powers--when playtesting showed patient single players could easily surpass the level without needing other players.

Asset creation

In order to aid our art team, I also constructed new assets from existing art assets. The biggest areas I covered in this way include the bronze mural doors, the tutorial murals, and the galaxy room. For the murals, I took the rigged characters in Maya, posed them, and compressed them into near-flat sheets. I implemented them in-game on doors and walls, lit them, and ensured proper alignment when mural pieces were attached to their sockets in game play.

The tutorial murals in particular (above right) serve a functional purpose to teach players about their abilities. While we built the game to be beatable without them, we found some players during play testing would find one or two of them interesting when stumbling across them on their own. We wanted to show players what they could do early in the game with minimal hand holding, so we put these in our tutorial area, replacing strings of text that would pop up on the screen. I created these with posed rigs in Maya, letter decals, lighting, and three re-textured assets and placed them through the tutorial area. They were later attached to walls that would drop when players pressed the corresponding key, allowing them to progress through the tutorial.

World Design

Upon joining the team, there were a slew of creative ideas from the vertical slice process, but many were underdeveloped and not yet woven into the game. Part of my tasks included streamlining these ideas into immediately implementable tasks, documenting them, defining terms and purpose for previously existing concepts, and coming up with new ways to develop the world of Lanterns.

Several of these designs are included in the documentation section below, such as:

Defining Collectables and their usefulness to players
Defining Crystal Fragments and their usefulness
Creating the style and purpose of Murals, heavily influenced by historical Mayan murals
Designing a system for World Borders and how to keep players from venturing too far away from their team
Designing a system to alert other players that a teammate is low on health
Defining target sounds for enemies to coordinate sound engineering amongst designers

In addition, I designed and iterated on the literal map of the world. I utilized the Unreal terrain editor and frequently synced with the art team in order to achieve player traffic direction while hitting target art aesthetics.

I also owned locating and implementing background music throughout the game. This most heavily involved generating the right atmosphere to complement both the artistic aesthetic and design goals for each area. This also included slight adjustments to the Big Boy fight and Title music, which was handled by other designers.

Listen to the Tutorial level. This section was meant to introduce the player to a strange, dark, yet wondrously beautiful world. The piece starts out contemplative and dubious as players begin alone, and builds powerfully as players discover their abilities and eventually find each other.

Listen to the Woods level. This level involves player separation and reunion. The wind and eerie strings in the beginning are meant to make the player feel slightly on edge, with chimes and bells hearkening to the Temple in the distance.

Listen to the Temple level. The Temple is a challenge of teamwork, so this piece was chosen for its light and upbeat rhythm and its "Hogwartian" feel to encourage the suggestion of magic throughout the level. In addition, this piece looped very well, necessitating very little alteration before its implementation.