An open world survival exploration game that takes place in the center of the Earth.

  • Responsibilities: Level Design, World Design, Set Dressing, World Building
  • Genre: Survival, Open World
  • Team Size: 8
  • Development time: 4 months
  • Engine: Unreal 5.1
  • Other technologies: Perforce, Plastic, Miro, Clip Studio Paint

An internship project that I was part of making for Amplifier during a 5 month development time. We were instructed to create a game slice of a game pitch that our group had made.

While the slice did not get to continue in production and into a bigger game I learned an immense amount of things from those 5 months. Not only in regards to Level Design but also working together in a group with people I had never met before, planning out a longer game project like this and how and where things can go wrong and the importance of core game mechanics.

The game itself takes place in the center of the earth where you are someone sent to find An expedition that has gone missing. Soon you find yourself lost as well in a strange and dangerous world and you have to survive as you try to find a way to get back home again.

Pre-production⌗

When we began the project we had an obligatory pre-production period where we were not allowed to start working in the engine and instead fully focus on developing the game idea that we had as well as the core game mechanics and narrative. While I was a part of all the discussions and worked with the rest of the team on brainstorming and world creation, my biggest role was to make Concept Art of the world and setting that we were discussing. My goal with this was to not only use other references as inspiration but also try to get the visions of the teams ideas down. Also to get the feeling and mood that we wanted the game to have by trying to have it shine through the art.

Early development⌗

Once we got to start working in the engine I immediately started doing so. Not to make anything that was going to end up in the actual game but rather because I had never done an open world before, and even less one that took place on floating Islands. So I wanted to see what I was facing in terms of level design and how I would go about best shaping the world that our game would take place in. Originally, we wanted the game to start on a beach. So I created quite a few variation of Islands with some water in it and a beach with a path leading away. Water on a floating Island was a challenge I wanted to solve and I had a few ideas of how to go about it.

Doing this also helped me get feedback from the rest of the group regarding the design of the world and how it felt to play and walk around in.

End-production⌗

Due to some difficulties in developing our core game mechanics, I had to adjust and make a lot of changes to the Islands I made. We struggled with one sole programmer, who did the absolute best he could while also attending the FutureGames programming education at the same time. In hindsight, we should have scaled down the projects size and our vision for it to fit what was actually possible for us to do in the time we had. It was a difficult project and everyone worked incredibly hard on it the entire way. It might not have ended up the way we wanted it to but the journey through developing a project of this size for the first time and over half a year when you have never done that before has given such a huge amount of experience in so many different areas that I now feel a lot more confident in my own abilities.