Ella Umbrella

A Spy-Themed 2D Platformer where you use an umbrella for vertical movement, and offensive attacks. Raising it up to glide, and down stabbing enemies by aiming it at them and holding down. You traverse labs filled with soldiers and deadly creatures to stop the evil Ivan from firing a mega laser and taking over the world.

I wanted to take in a sort of tutorial level that taught the player based off of observational skills in the environment. Things like having breakable blocks look a bit different from non breakable blocks (Thank you to the environmental design BTW), and interactive objects. I started out with a very simple drawing on my notebook, creating a key for things like breakable areas, and enemy locations, emphasizing verticality by making a long tower. Then going into Photoshop for a finalized version that I could then design my grey-box around.

The grey-box mostly used a lot of test assets made by our programmer, dragged into the level editor based off of a test map he had made. These included semisolid platforms, the doors, breakable platforms, and fans. But some of them had actual art assets from our environment artist. He was also our producer. I had then designed the early course from there, using premade blocks, but I ran into an issue with soft-locking, as the platforms I made weren't high enough for the player to get out off. I just raised them up, and adjusted the range of the fans.

The final assets needed some tweaks in terms of things like placing interactivity. But this was something I could fix manually by adjusting values and sizes in the editor. The most important issues however, were issues involving the enemies. I had only put three total enemies, as I had felt that adding too many would overwhelm the player. The enemies ended up with an odd teleporting glitch anyway, so I got in contact with the programmer, and he adjusted things involving the movement of the enemies and taught me what values I needed to tone down to change the fire rate.

In all, I'd say this was a really good project. The team was very on point with everything and the finished level seemed to impress our now-retired professor. I had a lot of fun working on this level, and it helped turn my opinion around on level building and editing in Unity.