Angela Wu
Game/Level Designer
AGRYOS: Recovering Eden
Summary
AGRYOS: Recovering Eden is a third-person shooter with elements of a bullet hell where you play as Neziha, an adventurer fighting to recover the Branch of Eden from a failed space colony. Destroy hordes of robots with Neziha’s versatile arm cannon as you blast through this fallen AI-created society. This game has two major levels, Storage and Greenhouse, and a boss battle level. As the team leader of the level designers, I was mainly responsible for the overall level design control, communication, and collaboration with other disciplines. Based on the feedback from stakeholders, we developed a modification plan, written tasks, timeline plans, and complete them with the level designers.
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Team Size: 16 (3 level designers)
Development Time: 6 Months
Steam Page
Trailer
Roles & Responsibilities
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Communicate with the level designers to design the levels Greenhouse and Storage.
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Communicate game art style and materials with artist lead.
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Communicate with the programmer lead on the features and arenas related mechanisms of the level.
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Responsible for setting the schedule and tasks of the level designers.
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Time planning and check level design tasks, make sure delivered on time.
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Assist the level designers to make the levels.
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Design the tutorial level of the level and implement it in the engine.
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Test and analyze all arena combats design, then communicated with team.
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QA tested each level to find bugs, then reported to JIRA and communicated with team for solutions.
Post-Mortem
What went well
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Completed a third-person shooter game, and realized two levels and one boss level.
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Everyone worked very hard on their work.
What went wrong
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Because there was no good communication with the art, the art had an impact on the design of the level itself when the art was beautiful, which leads to the need to do it again.
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Too many changes in the early stage made a lot of resources that were already done was wasted,
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The communication of the time planning was not good which affecting progress negatively.
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Frequent rework caused by unfamiliarity with resource management software.
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Due to communication problems, the level designers had very limited resources when building the level.
What I learned
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When making the initial settings of the game, take into account the strengths of the team members and what they are good at.
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Too much emphasis on pipeline makes communication very difficult, and communication in a small team can be easier.
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The work of everyone in the team should be respected, and the work of others should not be arbitrarily rejected on the grounds of changing the features of the game.
Design Interesting Arena Combat
Arena battle is the core pillar of our game. After the player triggers the battle, the door of the room is closed, and the player can leave after killing all the enemies in the room. When designing each arena battle, we pay special attention to the balance and flow of the game. In the initial design, I discussed the types of enemies with other level designers, decided on several types of enemies, and then discussed the feasibility with leads (art, programmer, game designer) in other directions. Finally, decided to have a fodder enemy, and two special enemies: tank type and flying type.
There had many problems during the design process. The biggest problem is the conveyance problem during the battle. Players often don't know when the battle will end and when the door will open. I tested all the levels and watched the feedback from all the playtesters to solve this problem with the level designer. We adjusted the spawn position of the enemy and used the enemy to guide the player. Finally, guide the enemy to the exit gate position without having to move repeatedly.
Design Tutorial Level
During the production process, I was also responsible for designing tutorial levels. The tutorial level is designed for several purposes: The first is to teach the player to move, and the player's movement includes dash and double jump. The second is teaching collectibles. There are some hidden collectibles in the game, which can increase the maximum life when the player collects them. The third is the arena battle, teaching that when the player enters the arena battle area, the doors on both sides will be closed, and the player can leave after killing all the enemies in the room.
Design and Implement feasible level layout
There are two major levels in AGRYOS: Storage and Greenhouse. When we set these two themes, we considered the level to be a tower layout, with Storage on the first level and the player took the elevator to the second level Greenhouse. The reasons for this design are that: first, a tall internal structure can be designed. Players have a dash and need a larger space for activities. The second is in line with the narrative of the game. At that time, the world view of the game was set as a building with a hierarchical system, so the layout of the tower was in line with the story setting.
We experienced a lot when designing the level layout. The narrative of the game was set in advance, which limited the level designer's options, resulting in the designed level not being very effective. Later we decided to remove the tower layout restrictions and design some jumping puzzles at the junction of the arena battles to ease the rhythm of the battle. In a later test, the feedback of jumping puzzles was not good. The players in the test felt that this would affect the rhythm of the game, so we decided to delete jumping puzzles and replace them with connections with several enemies, so that the player will end the battle in the arena. After that, the tension was relieved, but the attention to the game cannot be completely lost.
Although I think this layout design is not the best we could have designed, this is what we were able to achieved after hiccups in communication with other disciplines. If we had communicated and solved problems in the early stages, we may have been able to achieve more and better features.
Marketing Screenshots
