Railgun
Level Design | Team of 10 | Unity - PC | 2023
Railgun is a roguelike game in which you make your way through a randomly selected series of rooms on an intergalactic train invaded by aliens, fighting through and collecting upgrades as you play.
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Railgun was a project I worked on for the Game Studio II class at Champlain college alongside a team. Our project started as just a team of four but after passing through the greenlight process it was completed as a team of ten.
A simple enemy room design and design document
For the project my main work was to do level design. The game is made up of three main sections that each contain the player running through enemy, upgrade, and boss rooms. While the upgrade and boss rooms could stay consistent the randomized selection of the enemy rooms was important, so we needed variation. By the end of the project each of the three areas had roughly 30 enemy rooms, and with some designed by the rest of the team I ended up designing 60 total enemy rooms.
When it came to designing rooms for Railgun my focus was in making them stand out on their own while not becoming too cluttered or cramped, which was a real challenge considering the sheer number the game required. I also had to make sure as the levels moved on that there was a difficulty progression throughout the areas, setting limits on how little or how many of a specific enemy type could appear.
Area #1
Difficulty Room
Area #3
Difficulty Room
As I progressed in levels my designing structure would often surround throwing a singular object into a space and seeing what I could do with just it. If I could build a unique space around one enemy or object I could easily expand that into many different combinations, making brand new unique rooms.
This ended up being very successful, with rooms dedicated to explosive cover, long ranged enemies, or depicting a realistic space all standing out definitely on their own. Add onto this specific templates with objects for each area of the game this process became streamlined and easy to build off of.
A room highlighting explosive barrels with close ranged enemies who will be easier to push into their blasts
A room highlighting the sniper enemies, leaving open space giving them the advantage
A room highlighting the game’s obstacle decor, turning a simple space into a dining room
The many rooms I designed for Railgun all stand out to me in their own unique ways and I am very proud of them all, from the simpler open designs highlighting the visuals to the more complex ones highlighting the mechanics.
