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The Biggest Bad That Ever Was

Level Design | Team of 8 | Unity - PC | 2023

The Biggest Bad That Ever Was is a turn-based strategy game in which you control a small team of units on a grid board to defeat the opposing units. This game project was built as an early demo for my capstone class at Champlain college with the help of many other designers and game majors, however I was given full solo focus of the level and world design.

BiggestBadGameplay.png

Going into the game we knew we wanted to tell a singular narrative story with our game so I wanted to create a single world that could be traversed across multiple screens. This would enhance the feeling of the world within the narrative while also allowing natural progression and the ability to easier reuse past spaces to save on time. With that in mind I created multiple theoretical game maps.

CapstoneWorldMapVDDs-01.png
CapstoneWorldMapVDDs-02.png
Theoretical Early Map Design

The game’s narrative follows superhero and villain tropes extremely closely, making our setting of a bustling metropolis very simple to choose. With that in mind I brain stormed many possible level ideas that may have unique elements and laid them out into logical structures. The goal was to separate the game into sections that not only had areas that made sense to be nearby but also had signature villains that fit each colored grouping.

FinalWorldMapVDDWIP3.png
Final Map Design

World Examples #1 and #2 weren’t bad but levels such as the Subway Station and Park were high scope and hard to plan around. The final map design took a much simpler approach with a cross shape that looped on itself. The design was also polished into the diagram seen above, fully planning the exact route in which the player would reach each level and what they would contain.

With our world plan in mind the final step of the early process was level design, our set goal being to have one complete level, the park, and my personal goal being to design the first five levels.

Early Design
Plan & Goal
MapPlansShortTerm.png

My design process for each level all started with an intent that I wanted to connect to at least two of the following questions:

  • What made this level unique?

  • How was traversing this space interesting?

  • Was the player's goal interesting?

A great example of this would be the Bridge level.

BridgeMapV2Tile.png
BridgeMapV2Detail.png

The bridge level was the player’s third battle but the real first battle in which no major mechanics were being introduced. My intent with the level was to create an easy to understand design with new but simple concepts, those being the unique new sand tiles that slowed movement and the new enemy types that would inhabit the space. This design answered two of my three questions with unique enemies and unique traversal with the new enemies types and tiles respectively.

The above map for the bridge I would mimic for each level I designed, making a simple visual tile map and an in depth mechanics map, highlighting the specific important elements. With that in mind let's look at the final completed map, the Park.

SandyParkMapTile.png
GreenLightBattleMapV3Detail.png

Like all other levels I created a tile map and mechanics map . . .

SandParkFullMap-10.png

But with the whole location being implemented in game I also complete a tile map for the whole area . . .  

FinalGreenLightMapScreenshot.png

Which was then built into the game world!

(some slight tweaks were made with final asset implementation)

The Biggest Bad That Ever Was is by far one of the projects I am most proud of my work on as I created a complex but understood world map and level designs that fit together into that world in a way that really enhanced the experience.

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