Verdant Games
“Verdant games” is a student funded indie company we started as year 4 students and is currently progressing towards an MVP in order to potentially attract investors and publishers.
Primary Role:
Lead Level Designer
Secondary Role:
System’s Game Designer
Engine:
Unreal Engine 5
Team Size:
10
Short Gameplay video
Main Responsibilities as a Lead
- Making sure the game is going in the right direction through collaborative efforts
- Designing levels and gameplay experience. Exploring general level design direction for a top-down adventure roguelite
- Working with procedural systems for level and dungeon creation
- Designing and implementing an end game meta-progression skill tree system
- Ensure pipelines and standards are met for a healthy project and efficiency when developing
As a co-founder
- Supervising design interns (including contracts, interviews and career growth plans)
- Office and team building management
- Research and application of government subsidies and grants
- Lead meetings and company growth
Concepting: level design direction
For the concepting we went through a lot of iteration on the character and the levels.
Exploring many ideas for our top-down roguelike included:
– large open world levels
– exploration based levels like tunic with roguelike elements
– centralized HUB with an endless procedural open world level
– small to medium sized levels like in ‘The binding of Isaac’
– many level design ingredients like puzzles and time challenges
Finally we decided on a small room to room procedurally generated dungeons with lots of economy based decisions similar to The binding of Isaac.
Some level blockouts from the very beginning
Material Occlusion
I’ve been always curious to how RPGs and ARPGs with isometric camera set up work and fix the issue with objects blocking the player’s view. Something that we don’t want to give as an experience to the player, so I have been trying to figure out how to implement this feature in our game.
Initially the main issue with the first version (left video) was the set up because it required every material/actor to have this feature implemented which affected performance. On the second version (right video) the material dynamically changes based on the camera location, which is attached to the player at all times at the moment.
Blockouts
A gameplay showcase with these blockouts
Path of exile inspired:
1. Puzzle Challenge
The puzzle below and many many other LD ingredients I made are mostly inspired by the LD ingredients commonly found in the labyrinth in Path of Exile1.
2. Skill tree design and passive/actives implementation
The showcase below is inspired by the Righteous fire skill gem.
As long as the player has shield hearts (energy shield) they deal bane damage to surrounding enemies
Below is a snippet of the skill tree and my gym in which I tested various passive and active abilities that alter gameplay.
Below is a ‘before and after’ of me set dressing one of the many rooms for our vertical slice
One of my other responsibilities was maintaining the procedural graphs and dungeon layouts. Making sure things work and generate properly designer made graphs and layouts while also ensuring pipelines and strictly followed and improved
For those that want to go even deeper into my work I have a miro board that goes into details and everything shown above can be viewed closer.
Thank you for your interest!