Trek Through Time

This was the final project for my level design class, a group-made 3D third-person platformer that spans three different level themes. We decided to base these themes around a sort of time traveling experience, going across three different time periods. The themes were: A medieval castle, a modern city, and a ruined future time. I took the first of these levels themes. Based on everything we've seen from the asset packs that we had, we thought it would be cool to show off different time periods, as a way to test the level transition feature Unreal has. We had were inspired by asset pack we downloaded. It was one provided for free by out professor that had a sample town to walk around, which had a whole castle front, as well as some walls surrounding it. There was also another pack we had gotten because it had a lot of nice building assets that fit our more stylized aesthetic.

It was also at that time in which I accidentally discovered the terrain feature, which gave me the idea to create two sections to the level after messing around with it. The terrain feature spawns another spot over the original map plane, and you can sculpt it into basically anything. I made a channel using the digging tool to carve out a lake, and then put a plane with a water material over it to give it the look of a river, then stretched it to cover the channel. I then had to adjust some settings so that the plane didn't turn into a floor that the player could walk on.

The path then heads for first wall, reaching the middle across towers, and going atop the center building, then riding along the walls before reaching the end. This path was decided because I wanted to get the level to the point of things being precarious, but not as overtly so, to prevent the difficulty of the full map from being too mixed up. I wanted the player to get a look around the castle, which I did through moving the platforms and aligning the towers so that they could be used as platforms.

The castle was made with assets from that pack, which were all made separately. I laid out the castle by feel because I wanted to use everything we had and make a complete-looking castle, and testing and iterating changes in an orderly manner. I was later advised that the walls of the castle, since they were the main aspect of the level, they needed to be bigger. But stretching them didn't work out so well aesthetics-wise so I then resorted to stacking walls on top of them, and building the right wall's path to get up there.

I liked the decoration on display with all the trees lying about. They were another asset, laid out and duplicated, then positioned to create a full forest. The trees were included to introduce a natural barrier so that people had to at least kind of interact with the main course, though I implemented some skips along the walls themselves.