Dracula's Castle

For our final level design assignment, we were essentially given free reign over creating a level from the ground up. Starting with planning and documentation, white boxing, and implementing either a polish pass on the level or filling it with potential mechanics / blueprints.  This was my trial by fire, as I tackled a lot of concepts I wasn't familiar with. Documentation, sequencers, enemies tracking and firing at the player, teleporters, and building a level from the ground up in general. 

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I'll cover my methods of creation in the Design Process tab, where you can find a link to this level's documentation - but in a nutshell this level is a "modern day" take on Castlevania. Dracula returns once again, except this time its 2015 and the Belmont's have been upgrading their arsenal. Imagined as a "tutorial" level where the player is incredibly strong: similarly to Alucard in Castlevania Symphony of the Night, they can't actually die but instead get knocked back and pushed towards the lava. Fast paced and taking inspiration from Devil May Cry, I sought to make a prototype level that paints a picture for a dramatic FPS where the supernatural and natural collide. Dracula's castle, warped into a tower to better hide as an office building among a sprawling city, must be traversed carefully as enemies and the tower itself conspire against our Belmont.

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I may of bit off more than I could chew with this assignment, but the end result left me satisfied. I learned an incredible amount about blueprints and sequencers in this project. Their versatility and ability to allow for experimentation with mechanics let me play around with game flow and tweak it constantly.  In the future, I hope to do an art pass on this level, and test myself in other ways.