Hangover In Neverland is a puzzle game demo, made in college by a group of 6 students, in a timeframe of 4 months. I was responsible for level design, but also sound design, music, lighting, and video editing.
The game is comprised of 2 levels, the first one being a short tutorial, and the latter, a more 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 creating the base character and camera set-up, commonly known as the "Three Cs". During this phase, I started brainstorming ideas for the tutorial level, which was set in a graveyard. Both levels were already defined location-wise, so it was a matter of finalizing the gameplay beats, pacing, and the visual style.
During this time, I also started writting a very simple .txt with the ideas and mechanics that were going to be used in the level, and then, I had a meeting with the other design leads to brainstorm more ideas or iterate on my initial ones.
After having the character and the camera defined, I designed this concept for the first level. (Critical path readability is not ideal, sorry about that)
Once the sequence for the level was definitve, blocking work started. It was primarely done using the CubeGrid tool (New at the time), but complemented with other primitives. Once the geometry was done, the art team was almost ready with the final assets, so the blocking phase lasted very little.
Lighting was already pretty much finalized by this point too, due to previous prototyping and the fixed camera gameplay.
-Further Developments:
As soon as the graveyard level was functional, design on the following area began.
Thanks to previous game design work, I already knew the location and story beats that were going to be present in this level, so brainstorming and designing the spaces was much more quick; it would be a chocolate house, with exterior and interior sections.
The first interior of the house required some heavy iteration (Too large, problems with mesh geometry, not enough guiding...), but other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing. Here's a short video on how the levels featured in the demo evolved, from early production, to the 1.0 release: → →
While working on the second level, I was also tasked with the writing of an LDD section, for a more general GDD. This was irrelevant for the development of the game, since I had already finalized the sequence and verified with the other leads that everything was feasible, but nonetheless, it was a requirement for the assignment.
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 game 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 finished.
-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, due to the studio pipeline we followed, the writing and drawing of documentation and layouts, and the extensive playtesting and development milestones we underwent.
We got the highest grade of the class, and a great portfolio piece to showcase!
You can download and play the demo here. (Also on my itch.io)
