Recently I joined the awesome team working on Deus Vault.

I'm in charge of the Art Direction and level design.

I'm currently following my plan for the first 3 weeks which is to do some rough concepts for the level design, block them out in 3D, test them, and reiterate.

The goal is to have a functional level blockout for the first playtesting session.

I started with a style guide which covered the aesthetic direction quite clearly. This gave our team a visual goal that we could all work towards, and covered any smaller deviations in design or textures that might lead to an inconsistent look.

The styleguide is viewable here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cd18O32RupSFHBaDmFN6x-xPaWj0u9Th

After making the style guide, I sketched out a concept of a new level which would fill approximately the same space as the previous level placeholder by Tom.

I tried to implement some design and gameplay ideas into the concept, but wasn't sure how it would turn out until testing it in 3D.

So the next step for me was to block the scene out in 3D so I could playtest it.
After blocking the scene out in Maya I ended up with this:

Testing it in Unity, I realised that the space wasn't working well, and as our movement controls had improved to allow more freedom of movement, I needed to change the verticality of the map to allow for more exploration - platforms to jump between, bridges to go under, objects to go over and around etc.
Moving forward I will keep some of the themes that worked well in the blockout and do a major revamp of the level design.

I'm not bothered having to rework the level - I always expected to first iteration to be more of a test to get a feel of the level design and space. Failure is part of the process.

On top of this I also had a design idea for movement controls, which involves swiping in the mouse in a direction to make the sword swing at the same angle, giving the player a more responsive feeling during combat. To help my team understand how this would work, I coded the attack system into our game. We have mixed thoughts between us on whether or not to put this in the game, so we're going to playtest two sets of controls and see what feedback we get.

Other notable time spent working includes team meetings where we discussed and brainstormed features and design revisions, and also contributed a proposed timeline for the concept art and environment design pipeline.

Rhys Griffiths (s3238038)