Bifröst: Through the Realms

My Process

         My involvement began with research into Norse mythology to accurately represent names and locations within the levels. From there, I worked with concept artists to create artwork for each level, including color schemes, environmental themes, and architectural styles. I began by working as a 3D modeler since I felt comfortable with environmental design.

Level Design

After speaking with the producers, I was reassigned to the design team and I began working with the other Level designers on the team to design 2D layouts for each level, excluding Level 2. From there, I started molding the landscape to match our designs and concepts and blocked out interactable areas. After that, I worked with the 3D Artists, Environmental Artists, and VFX Artists to bring the levels to life and placed the majority of assets in the levels. The final part I was involved in as Level Design Lead was coordinating playtesting to receive and redesign specific areas according to feedback. All this was done while simultaneously running Quality Assurance checks throughout the Entire Project. The last thing I did, and one that I am proud of, was the creation of an extensive Developer Gymnasium for all components of the entire project. As shown in the screenshots (right), the gym consisted of designated areas for all types of testing. These include Movement Metrics and Scales, Rift Weapon Ranges, Enemy Arena, Environmental Assets import museum, the Engineering testing grounds, Hall of Materials, VFX, and music. We had the phenomenal opportunity to get an intern to our team, who was a softmore student in the Games program. He was interested in Level Design, so I took the responsiblity of meeting with him and giving him tasks, as well as teaching him how to use the game engine. I also had the opportunity to meet with students from the Berklee College of Music that we worked with to create our game's soundtracks.

Production

As Associate Producer, I acted as a liaison between the two Producers and the rest of the team. I helped to coordinate and run weekly and bi-weekly meetings. I collaborated with each strike team to implement game elements such as engineering movement mechanics and interactable abilities such as checkpoints and other trigger points, editing and placement of Niagara VFX systems, and finding and scripting a variety of minor SFX. Lastly, I did two things I enjoyed: Playtesting and Visual Storytelling. As I was constantly playing, I gathered information about our game's progression and visual indicators to share with the team. My version of visual storytelling for this project was via a Miro board that I created for the team to compile all of our concept art references. This served as the master visual style guide for all aspects of our game, ranging from levels, models, Norse research, and more. I enjoyed being that board's curator and helping convey the vision for the game to others.

Narrative

My work on Narrative includes writing many lines of dialogue, instructional UI elements, and lore excerpts for the collectible Datapad logs in the game. Working closely with the team's Writer, we crafted a unique storyline with many references to Norse Mythology. I then took upon myself the task of dialogue trigger placement throughout all levels. I played each level slowly and as fast as possible to find the ideal distances between triggers which allowed for the most important dialogue information to be conveyed.

PostMortem

I learned so much from my time on this game and with my team. I learned a lot about how difficult it can be to work with student teams, where we all have different schedules and expectations. I learned a lot about my own limits for how much time and energy I dedicate to my passion of building games. The best thing I got out of this opportunity was the clarity of finding what I enjoy doing the most, which is Level Design.

In regard to the game itself, I realized that I should have done more research into speed running games. My lack of knowledge and experience led my designs to be more linear and not dependent enough on precise platforming. The open world style that I implemented with the landscape tool in Unreal allowed for too much freedom of movement. After spending another two years in the graduate program, I was able to realize my mistakes and learn how to focus more on the metrics and mechanics, rather than getting caught up in the narrative and aethestics.