Atan
- 3rd person action adventure
About
This page is a work in progress.
Atan is an action-adventure game where you have to climb a gigantic Mayan god to take over its mantle as the deity that holds up the sky. You traverse by expereminting with your climbing tools that allow the player to freely explore the levels and use your bow to remove obsticals, activate ancient mechanisms, and user it together with your rope to swing large distances.
This game out for early access on Steam.
On this project, I am a full-time level designer responsible for planning, blocking out, play-testing, iteration, and communication between level design and environment art.
Responsibilities
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Planning level structure
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Sketching
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Creating block outs
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Playtesting and iterating created playspace
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Working together with environment artists to set dress the levels
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Set dressing
Level progress
For this project, me and two other level designers have been mainly working on the second level in this game. This level is set right after the player has been onboarded to the main climbing mechanics in the onboarding level. This level teaches the player how to use their bow to manipulate their environment, clear paths for climbing or by hitting targets that activate the inner mechanics of this ancient giant.
The climbing in this level gets more intense with the introduction of the rotating gears that the player climbs over in various ways.
This level is currently still under construction and will be the sole level released for early access. This level has already taught us a lot about where the fun in the game and player character lies. Things like giving the player freedom to approach challenges in multiple ways, using as many of the player tools as possible to incentivise exploration with their tools, and creating paths that the player can look back down on at the end of the level to show how far they have come.
Through play-testing in the next couple of weeks this level will be tweaked and hopefully we can gain even more insights into what type of levels suit this game and its character.
Game planning
For this project I wanted to make sure that there was really good collaboration between level design and environment art, to do this I created a possible planning for the levels for the game and in what stage they would be in what week. This planning was then shared with the environment artists where they gave their input and the planning was adjusted. Since plans and scope of the project always changes we have kept updating this planning to reflect the current state of the project and the future plans.
At the end of the project, it became only more clear how plans are great to make they are never accurate. In the bottom two pictures, you can see the planning created after we delivered our vertical slice and then what the actual production pipeline ended up looking like in the bottom picture.
The scope of levels was a continues conversation topic between our environment art team and the level design team. We always checked in with environment art to see what was feasible, how we could alleviate some of their workload, or how big the new levels could be. This resulted in level two being suspended form the arm of the colossus to reduce the amount of surface area that had to be setdressed, and made the second level a lot smaller compared to the other two levels.
Leading lines
To give a sense of a big open climbing section that the player can tackle in multiple ways I created an initial block out that had many splitting paths. These paths would lead the player through harder parts that would be faster, or easier paths that would take longer. This blockout was tested with players early in development.
The results of this playtest was clear, with the camera facing the back of the player and the large branching paths players did not know where they where, where they needed to go and if they path they where taking was the correct one.
To fix this issue in the next iteration I kept the branching but made sure that all the paths pointed in the same direction. Using these leading lines players felt more free to chose their path since they knew all paths would lead towards the same direction. This also made it a lot more clear what the path forward was and made players more comfortable to look for secrets since they knew when they where done looking where they needed to go.
Lighting
After the environment artists did the second art pass we found that in playtesting people had a harder time finding where to go than they did previously. A new shader was used that caused shadow areas to be much darker than they used to be. We therefore chose to create a custom shader for indoor areas that brought up the shadows a lot.
For outdoor areas, I experimented with placing lights to highlight the gameplay area. I was worried this would look unrealistic but with the new shader, we could get away with more unrealistic lighting. I turned of cast shadows to allow us to place lights from any direction. The result of which can be seen on the left.
Although the effect is subtle, playtesting showed that this had alleviated the issue with players having a hard time figuring out where to go next.
After this test lights where placed through all the levels to keep the gameplay areas as clear as possible.
Visual aids/leashing
The most important interactable in our game is the anchor. This object allows the player to secure themselves while climbing with the use of a rope. These anchors are placed around climbing challenges for players to regain their stamina. We used these anchors as breadcrums in our game to give players a hint of where we want them to go.
Before releasing the game in early access I noticed that the anchors were hard to spot and as a last resort we decided to color them bright red for the early access.
After we continued developing they got a real texture that was more realistic but this texture was extremely hard to see as well.
I therefore came up with the idea to add pieces of cloth to the anchors that could wave in the wind. This would allow us to add back the bright colors and with the addition of movement they could attract even more attention from the player. This change vital for the readability of the game.
Guidance
On the left are some before and after photos of one of the beats I had ownership over. This location was meant to let the player freely explore a small climbing area, find their own route and look for secrets. In the following paragraphs I will highlight some of the most valuable lessons learned about guidance for our game.
Vistas
With a game that takes place on top of a gigantic colossus vista shots are some of the most important in our levels. Giving the player a glimpse of this gigantic beast and showing how high up they are where important moments for us as level designers. This is why we started early during the concept phase to investigate how to do these vista shots, we experimented a lot how and when to show the shots, created custom camera tools to allow us the best shot possible, and worked extremely closely with the environment artists to get the best shot possible.
Level Planning
After building early prototype levels and investigating gameplay beats in a gym we where able to create a node map for the plan of the level. The structure of the level is based on the 4-step level design process and the intensity of the level was determined by following a 3 act structure since we are building a more cinematic game. For each beat we determined what their function was and what gameplay would be used.
This node map will most likely change as more information on how the level plays will be gathered through play testing.
Level investigations
Before creating or even planning the level me and the other level designers went through multiple test levels to find out where the player characters limits where and where the fun player experience lied.
Every 4 weeks we had to show our progress to our stakeholders and to show really well what the team had been working on, and to get some practice in place for building levels we build 3 showcase levels before working on the first iteration of the final level. This experimentation proved vital to the team since it brought up interesting design questions around mechanics, art, and story telling. But it also me a better understanding of how to build vista shots, build interesting rock faces that also limit the edge of world, and find out that dynamic climbing (moving obstacles) are very fun for the player to traverse.
Besides building levels a lot of time was also spend in gyms, building different beats and finding fun interactions with the player and level systems. Sometimes this was done by playing around with the systems in engine but also quite often it first started on pen and paper and moved over to the gym afterwards.
Prototyping
During the concepting phase of this project I prototyped different systems that could create interesting player or level mechanics.
The player mechanic I was most focussed on during this phase was the climbing, I was investigating how we could change climbing from getting to point A to point B in a straight line to a more interesting system where between A and B the player would still be interating with systems. This resulted in me building a stamina system where the player would be effected by the colossus movement and had to manage this resource to traverse.
My level mechanic investigations all revolved around the "mechanical" part of the colossus. Having switches that move, rotate, and change objects in the scene. This way the player would be effected by and have limited control over their environment.
Since i fully moved over to level design after concepting non of these features where further developed by me, but the game still contains a stamina bar inspired by my prototype, and has targets, gears and rotating objects that where directly inspired by my prototypes as well.
Take-aways
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Having to build a level that facilitates two very different ways of play adds a lot of extra block out and iteration time to the creation of the level
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The addition of set dressing can result in unforeseen issues in the block out and level designers need to work closely together with environment artists.
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Going through the process of playtesting and iterating often is how the rough edges of a level can be found and ironed out.
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Creating a level structure that easily can be adjusted based on the scope of the game will allow the level designers to make sure they can deliver high-quality levels within the allocated time