Cutesade
A collaboration project we are making for a module at Staffordshire University. We are 20+ students working together across different courses and years. As a second year student, I am currently a junior level designer and producer working together with second and third year students. This vertical slice is being developed in Unreal Engine 5 over 8 weeks.
About The Project
In Cutesade the player plays as Sir Killman, a futuristic sci-fi knight with murder on their mind. Sir Killman has entered a magical fantasy world through dimensional means and is fighting any mushrooms, unicorns, and garden gnomes that stand in their way. This game is a third-person, roguelite, horde shooter where YOU play as the merciless bad guy.
About My Roles
On this project I am one of two level designers; my role is to create the 2D maps for the levels while Morgan Hellsing translates these into 3D environments using Unreal Engine 5. On the side of my main role, I am also taking on the role of junior producer to help the group now that we are halfway into development. I will be displaying what design and progress I have made on the project here, along with the finished vertical slice once we reach that stage.
Designing the forest level
We brainstormed a lot of possible level options together with the group. In the end we settled on making level 1 a magical fungi forest. Me and Morgan began creating moodboards and making notes of ideas. I then began sketching up several ideas for maps on paper before making the two final proposals for the level in Photoshop.
Importing 2D heightmap to Unreal
Once the map proposal had been accepted I attempted to create the map in Unreal Engine by importing the map as a grayscale height map to use for landscape creation. This revealed that I needed to tweak the image size and greyscale values so that Morgan could have a good starting point for blocking out and polishing the landscape.