Hangover In Neverland is a puzzle game demo, made by 6 students, in a timeframe of 4 months. I worked as a lead level designer and lead sound designer, but also collaborated on other departments.
The game is comprised of 2 levels, the first one serving as a short tutorial, and the latter as a fully fledged level.
The game was promoted in a national trade fair, and even featured in an IGN article.
-Initial Planning:
This demo was my first big project working as a level designer. My aproach was highly based on the info I could find online, and the suggestions of my teachers.
The first days of development were focused on defining the "Three Cs".
During this phase, I started brainstorming ideas for the tutorial level. Both levels were already defined location-wise, so it was a matter of designing the flow, gameplay beats, pacing, and the visual style.
I started writting a very simple .txt with various ideas and mechanics that would possibly be featured in the level, and then, I had a meeting with the other design leads to brainstorm more ideas or iterate over my initial ones.
Initial concept and layout for the first level.
Once the sequence for the level was semi-definitive, blocking work started. It was primarely built using the CubeGrid tool, but complemented with other primitives.
At this point, lighting was already pretty much finalized, due to previous prototyping and the fixed camera gameplay.
-Further Developments:
As soon as the graveyard level was playable, design on the following area began.
Brainstorming and designing the spaces was much quicker, as the gameplay beats were already defined; the level would take place in a chocolate house, with both exterior and interior sections.
The first interior of the house required some heavy iteration that was made visible thanks to playtesting. Level felt too big, player guiding fell short, and there were some geometry-related problems. Here's a short video on how the levels featured in the demo evolved, from early production, to the 1.0 release: → →
I was also tasked with the writing of an LDD section, for a more general GDD. I had already finalized the sequence and verified with the other leads that everything was feasible very early in development, but nonetheless, it was a requirement for preservation purposes.
This LDD featured a high-level description of the areas, the sequence for the completion of the levels, the layouts of the spaces, a flowchart and an intensity graph.
High-level description and sequence of the first level.
Intensity graph of the second level, with color-coded events.
After the second level's blocking was finalized, and the demo was playable from start to finish, we got our game into the 2022's Expotaku's indie stand, in A Coruña, thanks to which, dozens of assistants got to play our demo, and gave us priceless feedback and testing hours, which helped polish the levels tremendously.
After reviewing their feedback, and fixing some small details that were made visible during playtesting, my work as a level designer on this game was over.
-Conclusion:
Although Hangover in Neverland was my first big project as a level designer, I still believe it turned out great. Of course, as the years have gone by, I now realise there are things that could be improved, but I'm still very proud of the final result and how it holds up.
This was also a great way to get a taste of how professional level design and general videogame development works, thanks to the studio pipeline we followed, the writing and maintaining of documentation and layouts, and the extensive playtesting and development milestones we underwent.
We achieved the highest grade of the class.
You can download and play the demo here. (Also on my itch.io)
