The Tyrant's Castle
Make your way to the top of The Tyrant's Castle and claim your vengeance!
Developed by Mark Auman, James Mitchell & Bach Ulziikhutag
Roles on Project: Lead Designer, Lead Artist, Lighting & Programming
About The Tyrant's Castle
The Tyrant's Castle was a project developed for the IGB321 - Immersive Game Level Design unit at QUT. It was a group project wherein we had to develop a set of level tiles, and used them to construct three levels. In the Tyrant's Castle, you play as The Revenant, a soldier who has been captured by The Tyrant King and his forces, who have destroyed your home land. With the help of an ally guard who sets you free, you are set on the path of vengeance, making your way up the castle in order to kill the Tyrant King and end his reign once and for all.
Summary Of Work & Contributions
Developed pre-production artefacts including mood/reference boards, concept art, and level design diagrams
Developed 1/3 of the tiles that make up the levels of The Tyrant's Castle
Developed the second level of The Tyrant's Castle called The Castle Grounds
Did light baking for all three levels of the game
Implemented the NPC dialogue and UI systems
Game Screenshots
Outcomes Of This Project
This project enabled me to develop my level design and lighting skills. The focus of the IGB321 unit was on level design, and so much of my experience developed here was with designing and developing levels.
With this project, I was able to work through a full level development pipeline, starting from mood boards and research, creating top-down level diagrams, and then use those artefacts to create the level tiles and levels themselves.
I was also surprised by how much I learned and worked on lighting as well, as I spent quite a bit of time learning how to use light map baking in order to achieve the lighting present in the game.
My Process
Moodboard, References & Concept Art Work
This project was developed by myself, James Mitchell and Bach Ulziikhutag. I acted as the Lead Designer & Lead Artist as my two teammates were both programmers. During the pre-production phase I was in charge of coming up with the aesthetic of our levels, as well as coming up with the design philosophy for our levels. I first came up with a mood board so we had reference for what aesthetic we were aiming for with our project as well as to gather references for specific elements of the game, such as the camera angle and architecture of our levels.
Using that moodboard I came up with a colour palette for the levels and found a series of textures that would compose the bulk of our levels
I also developed concept art for the characters that would feature in the game.
Level Design Work
My work also revolved around designing a third of the tiles our levels would be composed of (each team member was delegate a third of the level tiles to design).
Using these tiles along with the other tiles developed by my teammates, we each constructed one of the three levels of the game, with level two being my responsibility.
The rest of the pre-production phase involved me writing out the design document for our three levels, a well as planning out the development schedule of the levels over the next month.
During production, my main focus was on developing level 2 which is shown above. The tiles were developed by each member of the team, with each of us doing 4, we then changed the aesthetics of them to fit our respective levels. I also did some programming work my own level to make certain elements such as the main gate open once the player had activated three levers found throughout the level.
Level Lighting Work
The scale of our levels meant that the default real-time lighting setup of Unity was not viable, as the number of lights present in our level using a real-time system would cause a significant drop in performance. I was unwilling to compromise on the lighting of our levels, as I strongly felt that they enhanced the mood and atmosphere of our levels.
After researching different lighting techniques, I ended up using light map baking on the level geometry to make the shadows and lighting on them look high quality, and then used light probes in order to give the illusion that moving objects such as the player and enemies in the game were being lit in real-time.
Overall I am quite proud of the result that I achieved through these techniques.
Level Lighting & Aesthetics Showcase
The results of this lighting and level development work is shown below.
Beyond that, I also did programming work for the project at large, implementing systems such as the dialogue and prompt system, as well as the health & mana system.