Hangover In Neverland is a demo made for college, by a group of 6 students, in a span of 4 months. I was in charge of level design, but also sound design, music, and video editing.
The game is composed 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 being my first project working as a level designer, my aproach was highly based on the info I could find online, and what my teachers suggested me.
The first days of development were focused on creating the base character and camera set-up, but during this phase, I started prototyping ideas for the tutorial level, which was set in a graveyard, already in-engine.
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 the "Three Cs" were more finalized, the gym level was created, and I started drawing a layout for the graveyard level.
Once the sequence for the level was definitve, blocking work started. It was very quick, due to the size of the level, and the Cubegrid tool, which was something new at the time! After having the structure 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, the design for 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. The final designed level would feature a chocolate house, set in a beautifully flower-filled valley (up to players imagination), with two different interiors.
The first interior of the house, the second part of the level, required some heavy iteration, since the first prototypes had some difficulties (being too large, problems with geometry, not enough guiding...), but other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing. At the bottom of this page, you will find a comparison between the different versions of both levels, with some explanations over them.
At the same time as this, 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 time, which helped polish the levels tremendously!
After reviewing their feedback, and fixing some little details that were made visible during playtesting, my work as a level designer on this game was finished.
This was a great way to get into level design from a more professional aproach, due to the studio pipeline we followed, the writing and drawing of documentation and layouts, and the very satisfying result we accomplished at the end.
We got the highest grade of the class, and a great portfolio piece to showcase!
-Final Result:
Once the game was finished, I put up a simple breakdown of the process, featuring different screenshots of the levels, during different stages of production, and with some text, explaining iterations and other differences.
If you don't like the music, feel free to mute the video :(
After v1.0 released, a small update was pushed, which added some dead grass trails on the graveyard level, and fixed a lighting bug on the exterior of the chocolate house level.
You can find a link to play the demo here. (Also on my itch.io)
