Isle of Bones

Personal Project | Jan 2020 - May 2020

Isle of Bones: List

	Layout of the player's playable path and events that the player encounters

Design Process

Design Goal

Creating a third person fantasy adventure level with challenging gameplay in a gothic castle. Isle of Bones is designed to give players an exploratory focused experience.

Engine and Tools

UE4 | Adobe Illustrator

Mechanics

Since the level design had a focus in big, expansive gameplay and exploration, I wanted that to be a mechanical focus and chose archery and teleportation to be the main mechanics of the level.

Archery: The player uses archery to attack enemies and eliminate obstacles. This archery skill is made more useful by a slow-down time aim mechanic and explosive arrows for area of effect damange.
Teleportation: The teleportation allows players to find good vantage points to snipe enemies and finding hidden pickups.
Rolling and Dodging: The player has the ability to roll out of the way and dodge backwards, letting the player bait enemies.

My Work

Over the course of this project I was responsible for conceptualization, whiteboxing, blueprinting playtesting, set dressing, lighting, and optimization. The work I am not responsible for were the base mechanics and the art assets from the asset packs. with the caveat that I modified many of the mechanics and art assets. Spoken in more detail of below.

Asset Packs

Preproduction

Mood Board

Outlines and Sketches

After creating a mood board I first sketch out the environment to understand the world I am generally placing this level within, then concentrate on generating the player experience within.

Layout	Island Castle Sketch A sketch done to combine the compositional elements between more mountainous islands and the interesting castle layouts.

Whiteboxing

The Tower Interior A small teleporting challenge. This plus the previous teleporting challenge would make it so the player is unable to teleport away from the final confrontation.	The Bridge Teleporting Challenge	Knight Confrontation The player faces a fully armored, shielded melee fighter. This forces the player to make use of the slow-down time mechanic in order to get in close and get headshots while dodging.
First Area This area was designed to have a little exploration for the player to find explosive arrow items in order to force the drawbridges down.	The Drawbridges	Archer Confrontation The first place where the player has to use teleportation to get to the next instance while also introducing the player to a new enemy, the archer.

Blueprinting and Technical Work

In this project I created many blueprints for event sequencing as well as modifying asset pack blueprints and retargeting asset pack animations to new skeletal meshes to keep the overall experience of the level cohesive. I go into the blueprints more here, but below are the core blueprints I created from scratch to interact with player generat

Isle of Bones Blueprints

Watch Now

Click Image to View More

Set Dressing

Conveyance

I used a series of assets in order to inform the player of many things, such as alternate paths, item locations, and potential encounters.

Natural Conveyance: I used violet and red flowers, white trees, green topped rocks, and generally more vibrant natural assets to draw the player's eyes to potential paths, items, and the playable area.
Architectural Conveyance: I primarily used statues, symbols, and fire lighting to convey direct paths to the end goal of the level as well as reinforcing which direction leads to confrontation and which ones bring resources.

Landing	Path of the Tree	Hawks of Combat
The Statues Gaze	Trees of Renewal	Torches Light the Way

Kitbashing

While the Gothic Island asset pack had a few model buildings to show how everything wrapped together, the design and scaling of these structures were better for first person rather than third person. My solution was to utilize the modular assets they had as well as adding UI tiling functionality to the materials in order to build the structures I needed.

Castle Kitbashed	Castle Walls	Kitbashed Stairs and Floors
Island Kitbashed

Lighting

Due to the size of the environment and the many structures, I used the directional light to get as interesting shadows and show off the castle as best as I could. After that, I focused on my vista shots, such as the castle face, the tower, the gate, etc., in two ways. I either used a lighter, more intense blue to draw the player's eye to areas that the player does not interact with or to indicate secret paths, while I used firelight to draw the player to the areas I wanted the player to go to and explore. With the details focused and player path set, I did several passes over the map to eliminate dark shadows and bring out the interesting faces of all the architecture.

Final Lighting Pass	Initial Lighting Pass	Second Lighting Pass
Second Lighting Pass	Third Lighting Pass	Third Lighting Pass
Final Lighting Pass	Final Lighting Pass	Final Lighting Pass
Final Lighting Pass	Final Lighting Pass