Lichgate | NikolaTunevPortfolio

About

Summary:

Lichgate is a twin-stick shooter-inspired horde survivor rogue-like. The game was inspired by 20 Minutes Till Dawn and Vampire Survivors and designed with power growth, replayability and variety as the main experience goals.

Project details:

Development time: 8 weeks (Early May - Early July 2024)
Team size: 10
Role: Level Designer
Engine: Coral Engine (Custom engine)
Platforms: PC; PS5
Genre: Rogue-like

Context:

Lichgate was made as a university project during my second year at Breda University of Applied Sciences. The project constraints required us to create a top-down game using a custom made engine made by our programmers.

Engine showcase video

Project Role & Responsibilities

As the level designer on this project, my role was creating a world that facilitates the mechanics of our game and creates interesting and varied gameplay scenarios for the players. In order to achieve that result my responsibilities included:

Creating an endless procedural world by populating it with a mixture of procedurally generated terrain and hand crafted content to create varied and interesting gameplay scenarios
Oversaw the creation of the tools needed to create the world of Lichgate in collaboration with the programmers
Using a variety of tools and methods to ensure the world is varied and isn't repeatable using a limited asset pack

Gameplay Showcase:

Design Intention

Our intent was to swarm the players with enemies from all directions. With that in mind my intention was to design the points of interest in a way that would allow the players to funnel the hordes trough tight chokepoints and gain an advantage by using their magical guns. I also tried to apply that to the terrain generation. To achieve the final result the world went trough multiple rounds of testing and iterations.

Click on the arrow on the right to see gameplay where the players use the chokepoints to crowd control the enemies as intended.

Gameplay showcase

In this gameplay showcase you can see players using the choke points to crowd control enemies as intended

Populating a procedural world

Based on our replayability and variety experience goals we concluded that we want to go for an endless world. To achieve that we had to procedurally generate the environment and populate the rest of the world with randomized hand crafted content.

POI showcase

The first step was to create a bunch of small points of interest with uniform shapes (As shown in the video).
Click on the arrow to see how these small POIs were used.

Graveyard Showcase

The second step was to create graveyard layouts using the uniform shapes of the small points of interest as metrics and populate the graveyard layout with randomized points of interest (As shown in the video)
Click on the arrow to see how the graveyards were used to populate the world.

Final terrain result showcase

Generating the environment was also an important step in creating the world. We used Perlin noise to populate the world with trees, rocks and other points of interest. (As shown in the video)

Cross-discipline communication and collaboration

As a level designer one of my responsibilities was to oversee the creation of the engine tools that would help me achieve the aforementioned result. This required me to keep close communication with the programmers responsible for creating the tools and creating documents detailing what are my needs as the level designer. I was also responsible for testing and giving feedback to the programmers to ensure I the tools met my expectations and needs.

Examples of feature requests documents bellow:

Graveyard generator document

Click on the arrows to see another document.

Terrain generator document

Graveyard generator document

Click on the arrows to see another document.

Creating unique and distinct level moments and avoiding repetition

One challenge we had to deal with was that we didn't have any artist on the project, and we were given an asset pack by the university to work with. The asset pack was limited in terms of assets available for an endless world, so as the level designer I had to get creative and use different tools and techniques to make the world feel more varied.

Techniques used to make the level look more varied.

Click on the arrow to see the asset pack we were given by the university

Asset Pack

This is the asset pack we were given by the university

Conclusion

Overall, this was a very rewarding project for me as a level designer. Up to this project, I've only had experience working on linear levels, so going outside of my comfort zone and working on a procedurally generated world in a custom engine was challenging. This however put me in a position where I could learn a lot about procedural content generation and how can a level designer use it to generate a lot of content. I also learned and applied tricks to make the level random and endless but interesting, and how to extract the most out of the assets and the tools at my disposal, and I am very thankful for that opportunity.

On my personal end, I learned the value of going out of my comfort zone and experimenting, and I learned how to effectively communicate between disciplines. I am really proud of my growth and work as a level designer on this project.

Palette Cleanser Page

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Nikola Tunev - Level Designer