Treewarden
A Third Person Action Shooter
Trailer
Project details
Project details
Story synopsis
You are a former military hermit that has forsworn society to live closer to the great mother tree. But now nefarious humans threaten to destroy the tree and break the natural balance. Unearth your weapon and fight!
Goals
Focused on Linear Level Design with the goal of a Cinematic experience and creating Combat Encounter Design.
Project Details
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Made in Unreal Engine 5 over 5 weeks of halftime
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Uses the Interaction with ALS template developed by JakubW
Level walkthrough
1: Player Start
The player starts in a small groove protected by a rocky surounding wall.
The intended emotion here is safe and protected and the sense that you live here. For this reason there are several things to showcase a lived in space, such as a toilet and bed.
2: Climbing and falling
The player continues on to a climbing section. The purpose of this place is a rise in tension to contrast the previous area. This is achived through leading the player toward a bridge that will collapse and hurt the player. For this reason there is a crate of healing item after the section. This also onboards the player to the healing items in the level
3: Stealth
Here the player faces the first enemies in the level and instantly gets a snack kill. The experience is scrappy underdog that gets the advatage. This is achived by placing the enemies facing away from the player and giving them a powerfull assault rifle at the end. This area also onboards the player to some of the combat mechanics of the level.
Safe areas
Unsafe areas
Critical Path
Enemies outline
4: Combat Vantage Point
This is the main event of the level. Here the player will have a challenging combat encounter with enemies placed in strategic positions to make the encounter require strategy and careful possitioning to clear.
The player begins on a ledge that provides a vista of the entire area, allowing them to spot all enemies. Initially safe behind soft cover they won't be seen by the enemies until they start shooting.
5: Combat Arena
After dropping down from the soft cover of the vantage point the player finds a small platform with minimal cover. Nearby, a stairwell leads to a house offering better refuge but limited prospect. Inside, players can reload and heal. To progress they must however move on to eliminate remaining enemies. Taking a brief cover behind some rocks allows them to shoot at foes by the tower before activating a switch on it.
Safe areas
Unsafe areas
Critical Path
Enemies outline
The Process
Initial Idea
When crafting my portfolio in early 2024, I found inspiration in a LEGO bonsai tree gifted to me for Christmas. Observing it on my desk sparked the idea of centering a level around a grand tree, a concept I found inherently captivating. Protecting this tree felt like a natural progression of the concept. Drawing from Jake in James Cameron's Avatar, I envisioned the player as a former military character, subtly hinted at in the starting area. To evoke a sense of awe, I designed the level to repeatedly reveal the tree's majestic scale, ensuring its significance was unmistakable. Though an earlier version included climbing mechanics around the tree, the final iteration climaxes in a monumental combat encounter in it's shadow.
This is the first iteration of the level
Iterative process of the combat arena
Click to read how I made the combat encounter
Iteration
After making the basic blockout of the level I played around with the sightlines and methods of making sure the player looks upward to the massive tree. I eventually landed on the funnel into an upward slope that's more or less unchanged in the level today and serves to lead the players eyes. with geometry and lines.
Other iterations were made to the combat arena, stealth section and climbing section to get closer to the desired excperience.
Cutting back
As the due date approached I had to cut back on some sections of the level. I made the choise to put the cut right after the first big combat encounter to preserve an exciting end to the level rather than have the tension slowly die down. This also left me with one cimbing section, one stealth encounter and one combat encounter to show my capacity for each.
Here we can see an early version of the level with the parts that didn't make it cut out.
Refinment
Once the structure of the levl was finaly determined a lot of playtesting and iteration went into improving and refining the level, making all the sightlines more compeling, clearifying where the player is supposed to go and tuning the difficulty.
The first and final version of the starting area player home
Reflections
I think that too much time was spent on making the level look nice, this makes communicating my design to you more difficult. The time could also have been better spent on refining the designs, sighlines and combat encounters. I thing the reason I spent so much time on set dressing partially because I really like dressing and making the level look as cool and interesting as possible and partially because I wanted everything to be perfect for the portfolio. And so I keep working on silencing that internal perfectionist.
I also wish that I had time to make the level longer. The original plan was to make several sections after the first combat encounter including a section up into the tree and a bigger more extensive combat encounter as a finale. As time went on however, I realized that I could probably communicate my skill as a designer with just the parts that you can see here. This does however mean that the level is bit short, the pacing is not ideal and the ending is quite abrupt. This does also diminish the primary focus of the big tree because you never actually get to climb it.
I would like the tree to be hinted at better and earlier. It is the centre of the level after all and as such I think I could have done more foreshadowing and hinting at it.
I wish I had changed the colors of the player character to better match the story. A real skin color and some actual clothes could have gone far to sell the person I want the player to be.
Credits
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Uses the Interaction with ALS template developed by JakubW.
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LUSH_Stylized Environment Set, responsible for most meshes and materials, was developed by PolyPeak and sold on the Unreal Marketplace.
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Blockout Tools Plugin developed by Dmitry Karpukhin and sold on the Unreal Marketplace
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Simple models and blueprints were made by me.