Good day to everyone, dear friends! The Rummy Games team is here to present you the new Developers' Diary.
Today our developer, Ilya Alenchikov, is with us, and he will tell us about his experience of working as Level Designer in our team.
About myself
My name is Ilya Alenchikov. I am Level Designer and Level Artist on the Saturated Outer Space project.
One day the thought came to my head: "Stop playing games, it's time to make them!" And at the end of 2019 I went to study as a game designer at the Higher School of Business Informatics. Having completed my studies and received an honors degree, I realized that I am not a game designer at all. Yet my dream was to bring games to life, not create them. Vyacheslav Utochkin, a mentor from the Higher School of Business Informatics, helped me find a suitable role in game development. He offered to join the Rummy Games team and try the hand at level design. I will talk about this experience further.
About the tasks
At first I was responsible for integrating the base geometry into the engine. My test assignment was to study the game documentation and design the basic shapes for building the walls. After reworking the circuits, making improvements and other things, we approved our first basic geometry, thanks to which the foundation of any level is built. And our programmers have made several new tools for the engine, with the help of which the objects are placed with rigid binding to the tile grid.
Then I was given a task to “raise” Sector 5.2 according to the scheme of one of my previous colleagues.
The sector was successfully created, but did not go into production, as it did not meet our expectations. It was attended by a large number of narrow spaces that could complicate the further implementation of the mechanics. Postponing Sector 5.2 we started working on Sector 5.3, which has a geometry that is very different from 5.2. Just at that moment, another Level Designer, Artyom Safronov, joined our team. Over time, Artyom began to deal with all the planning and integration of mechanics into the level, as well as drawing its diagrams. And I went deeper and deeper into the creation of blockouts and the selection of the visual component.
Simultaneously with Artyom and our game designer - Dmitry Kondrakov working on the level schemes, I received a new task to work on the interior of the ship, on which the S.O.S. Between ourselves, we call this location the LoSh (Life on the Ship).
Before I started working with the ship concept, another Level Artist who was working on it, that is Sergei Kosenkov (a separate respect to Sergei, for having taught me a lot). Sergei is in our team, although he changed the scope of work. If not going into details, then I just took as an example the semi-finished part of the LoSh (the captain's cabin and his room) and proceeded to design the rest of the premises.
It took me about 6 months in part-time mode of almost solo development to bring the LoSh to a present state:
- creation from scratch and 4 alterations of the bar on the ship,
- creation of a character upgrade room and its two-time redesign;
- creation of the room for a mission landing and changing it to match the color palette of the rest of the ship;
- one-time, but significant reworking of the captain's cabin and the main character's room;
- double design of the outer space outside the ship.
All this and much more has been done and reworked several times, mainly due to the search for suitable means of transmitting information, mood and mechanics on the LoSh. Colors, shapes, textures, object placement and so on were changed. We'll probably come back to this issue in the future, but so far the concept has been approved.
The first variant of the LoSh
As mentioned above, simultaneously with the LoSh I worked on the first full-fledged game Sector 5.3+. It was based on Artyom's scheme for sector 5.3, but is a fork for a full-fledged demo. That is, in our game you will not find “5.3+”: the narrative and mechanics will be slightly different, although the basic geometry and theme will be very similar.
Today, we place the greatest emphasis on “5.3+” and try to iron it out, so to speak. Here I was mainly engaged in the development of the blockout (graybox/whitebox, call it whatever you want).
This is a very interesting experience. On the one hand, it seems that it is simple: you sculpt the basic visual component of the level from any available geometry contained in the engine (boxes, cones, circular geometry, etc.) and that's it. But the further you go, the more you realize that everything is not so simple. You can say that you are practically responsible for how the level will look like in the future, you lay the foundation and the logic, mechanics, arrange and bind interactive objects, and much more. This is a fun and challenging process.
The first options for Sector 5.3+ blockout:
Tools for work
- Unreal Engine 4
- Photoshop (creating LUTs for Post Process or, more simply, setting up the color correction)
- And a little bit of Blender's
Difficulties in the process
Basically, difficulties arose due to a lack of experience in the engine itself. This greatly impeded the implementation process. Nevertheless, I would not advise the beginners to immediately lean on the UE4 documentation. Of course, this will not be superfluous, but if you want to focus on the visual component (development and design of levels), then I recommend starting by watching various video tutorials on YouTube (unfortunately, most of them are in English) - for example, very good channels on the level design: Polygon Academy and WorldOfLevelDesign. And of course, start digging into the engine as soon as possible: this will help you understand what this thing consists of and how you can much more familiar with it. Also, do not forget to develop your imagination, inspired by other people's work. The Artstation platform, where people publish their work, can help you with this.
You can learn how to work with the engine on your own, without special training. The main thing is to put in more effort and be patient.
Final results
The ready LoSh (the ship interior)
The in-between blockout of Sector “5.3+”. Still under development.
In addition to the skills of working with the engine, I managed to gain a lot, a lot of experience in the development of mechanics, game design, as well as in team interaction!
Future plans
I will continue to work on the project and walk through this difficult path with the team. I will concentrate my efforts on the blockout and design of the visual component of the levels so that you can enjoy playing the game!
All the best and see you soon in the open spaces of the galaxy!