Chronowarden's Sanctum
Summary
The level takes place in Chronowarden's Sanctum, a temple of time.
The player must take on the challenges of the Chronowarden's eras of time:
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The Mechanical Era, featuring a gothic architectural style, clocks and cogwheels
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The Ancient Era, featuring a desert, ruins of old, hourglasses and sandy surprises
Each era of time is represented by a time-artifact of that era, connected to a lock mechanism of the main door that leads to the heart of the sanctum.
As the player progresses through the level, the Chronowarden herself is alerted by the intrusion and begins interfering, casting spells from her spectral form to stop the player in their tracks.
Breakdown
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Developed over 6 weeks half time
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Unreal Engine 5.4
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Asset details
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Character models & Animations from Mixamo
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Ultra Dynamic Sky for sandstorm effect
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MegaMagic VFX bundle for magic effects
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All other assets made by me in Blender or Unreal's modelling tool
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Goals
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Create an action-packed level, with emphasis on good level flow & pacing
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Create level ingredients that interact with each other
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Adapt the gameplay to my self-made ARPG template (created in 4 weeks during "Advanced Scripting Course"). Learn more about the template creation
Level Overview
A) Mechanical Era | 1st floor
B) Mechanical Era | 2nd floor
C) Ancient Era | 1st floor
D) Ancient Era | 2nd floor
Design Techniques
Composition & flow
Establishing goals
A challenge when designing a top-down experience compared to third or first person is establishing the traditional short, mid and long-term goals. I wanted to ensure the player has a clear goal to work towards in the level by forcing them to arrive at the main gate, before unlocking the paths behind them.
Foreshadowing & framing
Foreshadowing upcoming areas is a strong compositional technique. This in combination with framing certain areas or objects within the local composition of the scene gives the player a goal to work towards and a glimpse of what's ahead as they progress.
Level Loops
I wanted the player to return to the center courtyard, without having to backtrack through the entire level or use teleports. This was achieved by designing level loops to each side of the map that felt logical to the environment and events of the level.
Lookbacks & progression
In addition to foreshadowing, I focused on rewarding the player with powerful lookbacks to areas they've previously explored. This creates a strong sense of progression for the player as they advance through the level. It also assists with creating visual depth in the scene.
Scripted events
Cause & Effect
Creating a strong sense of cause and effect helps connect the actions you do as a player, or the actions done to you by external actors, with whats happening in the game world. I put extra emphasis on having a strong cause & effect at the main door, with the breaking of the artifacts being connected to the activation of the door elements.
Defining "wow-moments"
Besides the door sequences and the boss casting spells at the player, I wanted to have more stand-out moments throughout the level. This was achieved with weather effects and destructive sequences with my sand tornadoes, adding a dramatic twist towards the end of my experience. These moments were further combined with powerful lookbacks for an even more dramatic and memorable scene.
Sub-Levels
The Power of Sub-Levels
Utilizing sub-levels played a pivotal role in my design of the level. Not only did it help optimize the performance of a large level, it also allowed me to take certain creative freedoms during the design process. All sub-levels were loaded in or out in my level blueprint using trigger boxes.
Enabling views
It was sub-levels which enabled me to stack floors on top of another, by leaving the top floor unloaded until a certain trigger. This was the foundation for creating the powerful lookbacks previously mentioned.
Breaking up areas
During the development process, I expanded on my usage of sub-levels to isolate smaller areas. This enabled me to easily toggle the visiblity of walls, to ensure player visibility while being in a closed off inside area.
Pacing | Deepdive
Mechanics
One of the goals of the project was to make it packed with gameplay and mechanics to highlight some of my technical abilities and prototype skills. During the development process I had to cut some features due to time constraints. This led to the decision of making the gameplay of the two eras distinct from one another. The mechanical era would feature more gameplay mechanics, while the ancient era would feature more intense combat, while also providing a more cinematic experience and intensity for the culmination of the level.
I decided to go for the Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu approach for the flow and pacing of my gameplay mechanics. It's a technique commonly used by various Nintendo games to introduce game mechanics. I believe that this structure suited my ambitions perfectly, as I not only had many mechanics to introduce, but most of my mechanics also interacted with each other in some way, adding natural developments and twists to how the player must tackle the mechanics.
Ki - Introduction. Lays the foundation for everything that follows.
Tick, tock
As soon as the player sets foot in the mechanical area, they are forced to interact with the clocks in a harmless way. The clocks are timed in a way that the player will experience both the negative and positive effects, teaching them the mechanic in seconds. Directly after, enemies are added to the mix, and the player learns that enemies are affected too.
A harmful addition
During the clock introduction, the player is foreshadowed with the next element - cogwheel traps. These traps are introduced by themselves, followed by a short section consisting of traps and enemies together. The player must learn to time their movement to pass unharmed, as the traps deal damage over time.
Combat
Utilizing my template
From my ARPG template I had three enemy variants to work with; a basic melee, a caster and a brute with a slam ability. Given the short playtime of the experience, I chose to introduce them all in the first half of the level (the mechanical era), with a sole brute at the end. I did not want to delay the introduction of the final enemy type too long.
Variation by combination
In addition to the enemy types themselves, I could also utilize the combination of my gameplay mechanics as well as available player space to create combat variations in both eras. A pack of zombies alone might not be very scary, but when adding in cogwheel traps and time freeze, that pack of zombies is a new level of danger.
Pre-Production & Process
Level overview | From blockout to whitebox
Level Design by text
My process often consists of designing by text before I jump into the engine or attempt to create top-downs. Its a process heavily influenced by Steve Lee's text design approach to Level Design, as well as World of Level Designs Preproduction Blueprint. During this phase, I work almost exclusively in a Miro board, where I let my mind flow, listing and grouping ideas, environments, settings, themes and anything else that comes to mind. For this project, I also noted down memorable moments from other ARPGs that I've enjoyed, in an attempt to find some common traits that I could re-use or combine in my level.
Finding the flow, gathering references
After the text phase, I list all potential elements and areas that I'd like to include in the level, and begin organizing them into variations of flowcharts. This process helps me quickly iterate on different orders of areas, combinations of mechanics etc without commiting to a complicated topdown environment layout.
Playtest & iterations
The mechanics went through numerous iterations, based on external feedback and my own thoughts. One major change included changing the clock's function to be based on time dilation rather than affeceting movement speed stats. This allowed the clocks to also affect the cogwheel traps, adding a layer of complexity when combining the two mechanics with one another.
Ground it in the world
Re-occuring feedback during playtesting was that some of my mechanics felt out-of-place in the world, almost like they were slapped on the environment like a sticker. Therefore I added some time to polish the visuals of the mechanics, making them feel more connected to and grounded in the world itself.
Reflections
My initial scope for this project was way too ambitious. In addition to what I managed to create, I was planning to add a boss fight, and potentially even dabble in procedural generation of the map (which would've changed the project drastically, as I would've designed sections that could be paired with one another rather than a set level). I was also looking into swapping between the mechanical and ancient era during gameplay using a timeswap mechanic, similar to that of Titanfall 2's "Effect and Cause" level.
Cutting those features early was an important step, helping me find direction. I did have a hard time to let go of the idea of a boss though - and I'm happy with my solution of including the prescence of a boss with the spawned abilities, without the need for a scripted boss and designed boss arena. Don't get me wrong - I would've loved to have a crack at designing the boss fight with all mechanics that I've managed to create, but it would simply have to become it's own separate project at that point - something that I might revisit in the future!
Taking in external feedback was crucial for my iteration process of the gameplay mechanics. Without external feedback from classmates, teachers and mentors, some abilities, while functional, would feel very out-of-place in the world.