ZOLARIS
SOFTWARE:
Unreal Engine 4 | Blueprints | Maya
INSPIRATION:
1st person stealth | RPG | Fallout | Bioshock | Dishonored
JOB TITLE:
Creative Director/ Lead Level designer
TEAM SIZE: 13
DURATION: 8 Months
Zolaris is a first-person stealth game about Valeria, a spirit medium bounty hunter, trying to escape a cathedral crawling with murderous cultists. The player must use their abilities to defeat the cultists in order to escape their capture. In Zolaris there are 7 different maps around the Cathedral, 3 of which the player must overcome. These locations include - The Library, The Worship Hall, The Garden, The Crypt, The Main Hall, The Chapter House, and The Mess Hall.
LEVELS
When I sat down to design some of the map layouts, I wanted to design different areas to allow the player to choose how they wanted to play the game between stealth and combat. For this reason, the Owl and Bear paths were created for each encounter zone. The Owl paths prioritized Stealth, as where the Bear paths prioritized combat.
GAMEPLAY
THE LIBRARY
FINAL PASS
The Library is a source of knowledge within the game and serves as one of the challenge areas for the player. For this project I was responsible for mapping out constructing and implementing the "Owl Route" for the library. The Owl route mainly focuses on stealth and using player mechanics to allude and take down enemies without being seen. I focused on these concepts by providing narrow pathways to allow the player to hide or get the jump on enemies before being seen.
MAP LAYOUT / CRITICAL PATH
For the Owl Path, I wanted to use bookshelves to not only fit the theme of the library but to give the player cover to avoid enemies. Up on the top floor, I place bookshelves in positions to allow the player to pear around corners at unsuspecting enemies. On the bottom floor, bookshelves are placed similarly but there are more pathways the player can choose to reach their end goal. Depending on the enemy patrol path players may go on the right left or through the middle to succeed
LIBRARY CONSTRUCTION
After finishing the map layout, I jump straight into the white boxing stage. I made the white box in Maya because I felt that it gave me more control over the library's construction. Once the basic white box is completed I imported it into unreal and put a coordinate texture on it. That way to insure are incoming assets were scaled properly.
As soon as I started receiving assets I began set dressing and game testing the feel of the level. Some changes were needed, placements of pillars and the construction of archways but after that, I moved to lighting the scene.
At first I wanted there to be an abundance of natural moonlight in the scene but I opted to change it because I felt it took away from eerie abeyance of the scene the. To compensate for the lost light, we added a few flickering torchlights