“The Last Oricru is a story-driver action RPG, that puts you in the middle of an ongoing conflict between two races, on a partly terraformed planet, isolated from outer space by a protective barrier.”
Official steam page
After my leaving of Gold Knights, the project was re-branded from “Lost Hero” to “The Last Oricru”
this is why most of the material I have worked on is marked as “Lost Hero”
Client:
Gold Knights
Genre:
RGP (Souls-like)
Official Website:
Lost Hero
Steam Page:
Lost Hero Steam
Team Size:
10-15
Programs used:
Unreal 4, Custom level Editor, Tortoise SVN
Duration:
From: 01-07-2018
To: 23-12-2018
Project & Role Overview
The Project was a passion project of the company owner, and I was hired to design, whitebox, set dress and light a set of levels before the project released to early access.
The time span given for each level was 2 weeks. This included concept, sketch, whitebox, set dressing, lighting and enemy placement. The levels had to be around 15 to 20 minutes of gameplay and had to make use of the client’s custom editor and Unreal 4.
I was able to provide a set of semi linear levels with optional explorable areas that adhered to the brief.
On some of the levels I went over the 2 week time limit, some due to my own in-experience with the custom editor, and some because of late change requests of the client.
Level Design
- Whiteboxing, based on suggested locations, ideas and own propositions.
- Whitebox and design in custom editor and Unreal 4.
- Short development cycle (2 weeks for a fully playable, set dressed, lit and tested level).
- Set dressing using Unreal.
- Basic lighting setups for crucial path indication and aesthetic purposes.
- Iterations on levels to increase path clarity, visual appeal, additional paths and optional areas.
- Placement of Audio markers throughout 10 levels.
- Play-testing and bug reporting.
- Creation of 4 levels before I was assigned to continue set-dressing all levels.
As a note, I did not have to take into consideration any form of reality or place of the level, such as access/exit points to a level, purpose or function in the story or adhere to any form of lore.
This made it hard to come up with original levels that would still fit the game and not feel generic, or purposeless. I did raise concern over this (and several other issues with both the the production process & design of the game) during the creation of the first level, which was dismissed.
The following video is not created by me, however it displays one of the levels that I worked on. The video is in Czech
All credit for the video goes to: Hrej.CZ
Learned
- Workflow adaption to a 2 week production cycle.
- learning a new custom editor.
- Basics of Fmod.