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THE ALEX PROTOCOL

Roles
Development Info

  • Level Designer

  • Lighting Designer

Genre: Isometric Top Down

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Team Size: 17

Team Name: Lightly Salted Studios

Development Time: 9 Months, 2015-2016

Responsibilities

Level Designer

  • Design prototype levels for quick intense hack and slash type combat

  • Populate level with assets

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Lighting Designer

  • Design two interior lighting setups for both the playable space and the non-playable space

  • Bring the artists' concept art into a 3D space

  • Collaborate with Lead Artist and other artists to keep the vision of the game constant.

  • Confer with Programming team on efficiency of light builds

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Trailer
LEVEL DESIGN
Gameplay

The entire team helped brainstorm gameplay ideas with our Game Designer and we came up with a hack and slash, chaotic, and fast paced game for the player to experience. The main abilities the player has are grappling, throwing, spinning, and dashing. It was decided that the player character would not walk but instead be on wheels so that we could better indicate to the player that quick fast movements around the map were key to victory.

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Maps and Camera

After we figured out our main gameplay mechanics, we saw that being zoomed in next to the player in a third or first person camera really didn't showcase the player's abilities. The player's biggest asset against the waves of enemies is their ability to grapple to an enemy and quickly move across the arena. 

Also because our gameplay was so quick, we found out very fast how disorienting a first person or third-person camera would be with our quick movement speed. So we chose to have an isometric camera. 

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The map design went through a few iterations. We discovered that the gameplay is best utilized through multiple arena play spaces. We wanted both larger area spaces as well as some tighter fighting spaces to really put the pressure on the player. One really awesome bit of gameplay that came out of this design is that the player is able to smash enemies into the pillars on the outside of the arena. 

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AP_02.jpg
LIGHTING DESIGN
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Optimization
Themes

The lighting design for The ALEX Protocol relies heavily on the contrast of shadow and bright spot lights to create an intimidating industrial space.  By emphasizing the logo on the floor with these bright lights, as seen in the image below, our brains make a connection to utilitarian military regimes and the suppression of "the people". The stark white lights and long shadows enforce that the player should be ready for danger at any moment.

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In order to separate playable vs non-playable space, the background utilizes a fog effect texture as well as Volumetric Fog. The desaturated, soft, cool colored lights outside of the play space create a soft glow and haze around the outlying meshes so it appears as if nothing is very solid. This indicates to the player that they cannot go here. 

The biggest challenge in terms of lighting came during alpha when we started to optimize our aesthetics. I took on the task of optimizing the lights within the level. I went in and deleted lights in the exterior that really weren't adding anything to the level. However we were still getting FPS drops in the arenas

 

I also checked the details of the lights that were potentially causing some performance issues. I was able to move around the spot lights that were overlapping dynamic lights. This was a very big problem in areas where the blueprint had dynamic lights as children of the mesh and were utilized during only certain parts of the level. For example the console that needs to be destroyed has a few lights in the blueprint but where we placed it in the level was intersecting many of the larger white spot lights. By moving spot lights around the tweaking them slightly solved most of the performance issues we had.

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FloorLogo.PNG

Post-Mortem

Challenges

  1. Lighting a dark, moody interior while still keeping the space visible for gameplay.

  2. Optimize all lighting and rendering in engine without compromising the artistic direction.

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  3. Convey a color language to the player.

Solutions

  1. Utilizing the Post Process settings for indirect lighting to get the correct tone and feel of an underground bunker.

  2. Researching ways to create a depth fog that did not hinder performance resulted in using both a texture to create the nonplayable space fog as well as UE4's built in Volumetric Fog.

  3. Keeping the color pallet bright inside the level and less saturated in the background allowed a separation of playable and non playable spaces.

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