Mid-Death Crisis
Level Designer/Set Dresser | Team of 16 | Spring 2024 - Current
Mid-Death Crisis is a strategic, turn-based couch co-op game designed for three players. I worked on this project as a level designer and set-dresser. Mid-Death Crisis was released on Steam in May 2024.
This project came about as part of the Capstone program at Champlain college, and has been worked on over the course of two semesters, with myself and many others joining the team in the second semester. Capstone projects in second semester are developed over the course of 12 weeks, with each week acting as an individual "sprint", where we set goals and delegate to maximize workflow.
As Level Designer, my responsibilities to the project include:
- Creating and designing the levels and spaces that players interact with, and doing so in a way that provokes thought and strategy from the player
- Set-dressing and blending areas to become atmospheric and intentional
- Balance and bug testing for enemies and prop assets
- Coordinating with other disciplines (such as programmers or artists) as to what assets, tools, or blueprints that I will need to make levels the best they can be
Game Summary
Mid Death Crisis is a strategic, turn-based couch co-op game designed for three players. Embarking on this adventure, players take command of skeletal minions serving Zeborius Zelgon, a once-powerful lich now plagued by sorrow. Zeb's crypt has fallen under the invasion of The Rana Empire, a formidable species of frogs intent on claiming his domain. As Zeb's sorrow saps his magical abilities, players, serving as his most loyal minions must harness, empower, and collaborate to strategically redirect his spells to comrades, enhancing the spells collective strength. By overcoming hordes of frog enemies, escorting Zeb through his crypt, and rekindling his malevolent passion for evil, players confront the trials of the Mid-Death Crisis.
Technical
Mid-Death Crisis was developed using the Unreal engine V5.2.1, making use of SVN version control to manage the project. All scripting and code outside of Unreal's visual coding feature is done through Visual Studio 2022. Finally, we made use of the Atlassian suite products (Mainly Jira and Confluence) to handle and keep track of production and tasks.
My role
As a level designer on the team, it was my job to create the actual experience that the players will have. The biggest challenge for this was the creation of the tutorial. Due to the niche mechanics and nature of our game, the concept was a little difficult to get across to new players. This made the tutorial a difficult thing for me to design effectively, as capstone games are told to aim for having their game experience take around 15 minutes, ideally with the majority of that time spent in the "meat" of the game. This forced me to make some difficult decisions about the direction and approach of the tutorial. As a result, I opted to make the player onboarding experience a much more railroaded intro to the game. The first level is filled with tips explaining how the game works, and forces the player along a specific path so that they learn the necessary mechanics of the game. This was a painful decision for me as I love to give my players freedom to learn as they go, but due to the nature of the project, I believe the railroaded approach was the best way to get the players into the game. After the first room, there are still a couple of mechanics that are introduced, though the railroaded experience has ended, allowing players to take on the remainder of the game however they see fit.
Outside of the tutorial, it was my job to craft the other levels as well. Once the physical layout and enemy placements of a level had been made, I switched gears and filled them out with prop assets to populate the blank areas and create more of an atmosphere. The only issue was that collisions on some of the props were a little weird and would occasionally cause soft-locks in game. We solved this by removing collision from the props themselves, and manually placing collision boxes where we wanted them in the levels on top of the props, mainly large groupings of items like boxes or coffins.