a 1st-person shooter-adventure
Role: Level Designer
Building levels and combat encounters set in a grand library overrun by monsters.
Resource scarcity and overwhelming enemies drive the player into desperate situations where they have to use their environment in smart ways to survive.
Team: 27
10 months
UE 5
Project Role:
Level Designer
Research and Level Concept
Whitebox in UE5
Combat encounter setups
Scripting Level Design Ingredients
Cross-disciplinary collaboration
Using procedural and modular level tools
Testing and iteration
About Dreadtome
Corrupted Library
Monsters
Push Ability
Enter a corrupt and hostile library with the task of extracting forbidden knowledge from its tomes. Triumph over the entities that linger within, as well as the battles within your own mind, in this Action-Adventure first person shooter.
Demo Trailer
Reception
9000+
200+
All time Players
1200+
Reviews (93% positive)
Wishlists
Workflow breakdown
Concepting different gameplay beats and level layouts on pen and paper, based on inspiration from game research.
Using design sketches to communicate ideas to teammates and collaborate.
Concept
Layout sketch
Library Research
Seting up a gym level to measure the player metrics and prototype LD ingerdients, room layouts and combat encounter setups.
Gym Level
Arena Layouts
Ingredients Gym
Blocking out level progression using circular level design, focusing on pacing, objective setups, leashing and combat-focused playspaces.
Blockout
Initial blockouts
Collaborating with environment artists to deliver polished, atmospheric environments with proper visual communication in level design.
Using procedural and modular level tools.
Setdressing
Using procedural tools
Section setdressed by me
Project Work
Combat Encounters
Built various combat arenas in the gym level and combined them into level blockouts
Staged scripted wave sequences to achieve a desperate, overwhelmed experience
Built spaces that facilitate environmental manipulation with the use of the push ability and level mechanics
Pit Ambush Encounter progress
Environmental Kill Setups
Concepted and collaborated on level design ingredients used for strategic combat
Experimented with combat beats and arenas containing different environmental kill setups
Combined successful combat beats into full levels
Onboarded environmental mechanics to players with planned pacing
Barrel Push setup encounter
Early experiments
Environmental Kill Options
Utilizing this strategic level element allows the player to take out multiple enemies without wasting ammo. The placement of barrels is aimed to facilitate crowd control, strategic movement and environmental awareness.
Explosive Barrels
The setting of the library being in a bottomless cave was consciously chosen to give the player opportunities to use their Push ability to send enemies into the abyss.
Ledges
To give more opportunities for the player to use their Push ability against enemies Kill Walls are placed in strategic positions. The player must use crowd control to lead enemies to positions where they can be pushed.
Kill Walls
Level Blockouts
Created blockouts in the Concepting phase to explore the potential architectural and visual direction of the level.
Built gameplay blockouts focusing on achieving the player experience (desperate and vulnerable) and facilitating the player abilities and game systems
Created documentation to communicate design intent to the dev team
Visual concepts
Vertical Slice level One-Pager
Gameplay blockouts
Vertical Slice Combat Arena breakdown
Ld Ingredients
Prototyped and scripted Level Design ingredients to create unique gameplay moments
Built level beats centered around these ingredients (see King of the Hill below)
King of the Hill Capture Point prototype
LD Ingredient gym
Using Procedural and Modular tools
Used procedural assets created by artists to create custom level pieces
Built levels using modular architecture kits created by artists
Communicating with the art team on iterations to these assets to fulfill the gameplay function better
Stairs powered by Houdini engine
Entrance room architecture
Areas setdressed by me
Project reflection
Spending a year developing a 30-minute game experience in a team of over 20 people has been a great learning experience in professional game development. Throughout the year I massively improved in my collaboration and communication skills as well as my level design, having made a lot of content for the game. It has been an especially good experience working together with another level designer, sharing our different approaches and learning from each others’ strenghts. For me that was mainly learning to focus on modularity even more when building blockouts.
It was a joy to develop a game whose setting is very close to my heart and see the players’ reception being very positive. It feels good to think that we have created an exciting, fun and immersive experience for thousands of people out there.
