Hello,
I’m Marcelo Vianna a Level Designer at Hermit Crab Studio and an indie developer recently relocated to Vancouver!
I’ve been making small games and building levels for almost a decade now… from Warcraft custom maps and RPG Maker 2000 to indie games and level editors such as Trenchbroom and Hammer.
Eventually, I stumbled upon Unreal and fell in love.
I quickly migrated to UE4 than 5, started making levels in Fortnite, and even became a true evangelist for Hermit Crab Studio to enter the Fortnite landscape.
But a s a Level Designer, I felt very limited by templates. I could make levels and tweak templates here and there, but not as much as I wanted to actually make a full game. I’m pretty confident in my skills to create levels in Unreal but I have almost no idea how to actually make a game in the Engine.
That’s why I applied to the Fellowship!
About Me and my Goals
The Fellowship is a huge opportunity to learn everything about Unreal and develop a really cool game that will be played by a bunch of people on an actual arcade machine.
So my approach was to make a tiny list of what I wanted to learn in these 4 weeks.
My main goals are:
- Learn as much about AI and Behaviour system as I can;
- Make an arcade game meant to be played on an arcade machine (a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!);
- Make a scalable game that I could keep developing after the Fellowship;
With these goals in mind, the idea of making a Pac-Man style game with Metal Gear guards came to life! Somewhere along the way, I realized that the character wouldn’t have any gear, and “Naked Sneak” felt like a pretty funny pun.
Week 1 | Pre-Production and Tests
My first step was actually in Week 0. I saw the week-by-week roadmap and used it to create a roadmap of my own. Then, I iterated on that roadmap on Day 1 with Kaitlin Perry.
With a rough roadmap in hand, I now have deadlines and goals for each week.
Game Design Document
Right after setting the roadmap, my first task was to make a GDD, so I downloaded the template from the Fellowship and at first, I just threw in some images and references.
Then I added bullet points for each topic, elaborated on each one, and BAM! GDD complete just like that!
I have put into paper what was in my head, and by having this idea in a material state I could iterate on it.
Making it more concise
This step is one of the most important… cutting unnecessary elements, removing redundancies, and identifying what could make the game better..
One thing I always try to do is get different resources and combine them into one, for example in Naked Sneak in my first GDD iteratation there was, time and smokebombs that would work as life.
But by revisiting the GDD I came into the conclusion that the game sounded cooler if instead of having a health, to use the timer as the health bar, so the only game over condition is the time out.
By combining health and timer, i made Timer a much more interesting mechanic and the game seem much more fun this way, and it came with the bonus of reducing my scope in mechanics and made my Hud clearer!
Skateboard First and Moscow
My approach to development was a Level Design technique from Steve Lee called “Skateboard First”. The idea is that I would make the more barebones version of my game first, make it fun then build on top of it.
For it to work I went to my GDD and did a “Mo.S.Co.W”, basically labelled everything into:
Must Have, Should Have, Could Have or Won’t Have.
My plan was to face my Must Haves and make them first, I plugged into every lab I could and section with the things that I needed in mind, so everything I was learned I already had a BP making the version that I would use in my project.
This way I was much more intentional with my learning process, and was very hands-on. Every exercise and talk I was already exercising how that new piece of knowledge would fit my design.
Gym Level
As a Level Designer, once I had my template a bunch of questions about how this game played came into my mind. So to start I made a new Level, a gym level to test the parameters and mechanics.
First Mechanics
Almost everything that I made in this first week was either learned from one of the talks, a freebie that I’ve been hoarding from Fab for a while or something I tweaked in the Template (in my case the TopDownTemplate).
Considerations
The week started very frantic and I was kind of scared, but by developing a roadmap and with the support of Kaitlin, I scoped and managed my projects and not only it improved Naked Sneak and helped me absorb much more from each talk and apply what I was learning into a real context.
That’s it for Week 1!
See you guys next Friday for the follow-up on Week 2.