DESTINY'S PEAK - OVERVIEW
SUMMARY
Destiny's Peak is an abandoned mining town that has seemingly dropped of the face of the earth. Our intrepid explorer finds themselves at the blocked off gate of the train station. Luckily, they can take advantage of their mountaineering skills to find an outlook to scout the area.
ABOUT MY LEVEL
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Developed in 3 weeks half-time
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Unreal Engine, Blender, Photoshop
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Assets taken from IWALS by Jakub and Blockout Tools Plugin by Dmitry
INSPIRED BY
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Red Dead Redemption 2
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Borderlands Series
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Dark Souls
IDEATION
This week I spent a lot of time finding proper reference for a wild western town. I wanted to be able to intersperse frontier architecture within a canyon area. Planning this took a lot of time since a lot of buildings in that time period were built on flat, grid-like routes and canyons tend to be organic and unpredictable in nature. This is why I started pivoting towards references of specifically canyons and lone buildings in those areas. I wanted to nail the feeling of verticality that the desert rock formation gives.
PRE-PROD
DESTINY'S PEAK - TRAIN STATION
SUMMARY
The player makes their way from the overlook to the train station and immediately notices that something is amiss. The feeling is confirmed when they run into skeletons laying inside the building seemingly untouched. What caused the mass death of these settlers? The explorer journeys forth into the town to investigate.
NEW BUILDINGS
I wanted to give character to the town and I couldn't justify doing that with copy-and-pasted store building. So I took another look at my map and decide to finally create the buildings I saw there. I also took the liberty of adding a few buildings and areas. The final result finished with a new town hall area, a tar factory building, a water tower and an outlined mine area. This also gave me a chance to really think about how the lore of the town's demise tied into the environment as I placed mysterious black puddles into the level as well.
FLESHING OUT THE TOWN
DESTINY'S PEAK - PLAYTHROUGH
SUMMARY
As the player makes their way into town, they discover black puddles. They could be the cause of the skeletal shufflers fumbling around the factory level. The explorer fights their way through to hopefully reach the town hall and get some answers.
POST-MORTEM
I found this project to be a little too chaotic to design around, especially with the 1 week intervals I was designing around. The composition struggled a little from a rushed sketch in pre-production. Spending a little more time with the paper would have benefitted me a whole lot more.
Functional AI would have also helped with the design of the level. Having to design pathways around a NavMesh would have made the level click together in a sensible format. Right now the area feels more like a collection of buildings rather than a shambled together town with actual circulation.