Gerda: A Flame in Winter - Liva's Story DLC
Winner of "Best Narrative" Award at the Taipei Game Show and DevGAMM
Summary
Project Information
Genre:
Company:
Time in Role:
Engine:
Platform:
Primary Role:
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Narrative RPG-Lite
Bird Island (formerly PortaPlay)
September 2022 - March 2023
Unity
PC
Level Designer
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Description
Responsibilities
Level Design:
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Ownership over various levels from the initial planning to the level greybox to the final shippable product.
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Concepting, development and finalization of various levels throughout the game.
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This encompassed integrating gameplay into the level progression, scripting intricate sequences, and adapting content to enhance the desired narrative experience.
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Adjusting character movement, animations and cameras to support to improve the level experience.
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Level improvements and bugfixing in accordance to playtest/feedback data collected by quality assurance and our publisher.
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Maintaining cross-disciplinary communication to ensure smooth implementation of core features, art passes and narrative updates.
Level Design
Gameplay Integration:
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All in game events, cameras, dialog, animations, chance rolls, loot distribution, etc were handled in a custom visual scripting tool.
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This gave me a great deal of control and flexibility when putting together a scene.
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As a result I would establish everything inside a scene from the characters positions, their movement, animations, the establishing shots and dialogue cameras before sending it of to the art department for further refinement.
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Meanwhile on the backend it allowed me to manipulate the difficulty of encounters, perform prerequisite checks and change stats/items as needed.
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The system was also interlinked with gameplay objects in the scene such as interactables or triggers which made it possible to set up fully playable levels from the early stages of blockout.
Blockout
Finished Level
Missions:
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The game is primarily narratively driven so all missions content and gameplay needed to reflect that.
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As a result I worked very closely with the writers throughout the entirety of the process. All the way from the early planning stages of a mission proposal to their finalized state.
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Through this process levels would often be iterated upon and grow as the narrative itself evolved and become more fleshed out.
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Since the game featured heavy branching, the narrative progression between the levels had to be carefully preserved so that the players choices could affect the experience throughout subsequent levels in meaningful way.
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Combining all the listed elements above allowed me to create levels that can be seen in the game today.
Scene Example
Visual Scripting Tool
Blockouts and Level Design Proccess
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I created blockouts and planned out mission beats in accordance to a project brief and the level design pipeline.
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As the game featured heavy branching it meant that most missions had multiple potential outcomes and start conditions. These had to then be accounted for both in the level layouts and the mission structures.
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Once the blockout was deliverd I moved into an itteration phase with the aim of improving the levels as much as possible but just as importantly aligning the level experience with the narrative experience.
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Throughout this proccess I also worked together with various different diciplines to ensure the smooth implementation of art, sound and any unique gameplay/mechanics.
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I then had ownership over the level content and followed it through the full production cycle with strict deadlines from conception to release.
Planning out a mission.
Narrative progression and tension graph (from the writters).
Image Gallery
