This zone is focused on a concept I wanted to play around with for a while now. In most games I play I don’t tend to see a level set around leaps of faith as you would call them. That you are heading in the correct direction if you picked right. Unlike some games out there though going the wrong way won’t result in death or being stuck. You will simply have to take a teleporter back to the start of the zone and try again.
There are five floors and you have to leap through openings to get to the next floor. Not every single one of them leads the player on the correct path to keep descending further in this zone I’ve called Temple Of Minotaur.
This zone also falls under something I like and that is rewarding the player that has already done the zone before with prior game knowledge if they remember. Once you have discovered the correct path to not only descend but the most effective way of farming this zone if you are chasing after a drop. Player knowable should be rewarded in some way and that is being done by them having more efficient run times for farming if they go about it smartly.
There was one thing with five floors I needed to be mindful of as well and that is player fatigue. Naturally, the more times the player gets it wrong and the player being teleported back to the start. The more annoyed and fatigued they become of the zone overall. So I didn’t make things overly complex either and some zone design had this in mind as well.
One direct thing I did to reduce some rage quitting in this zone is on the fourth floor. There are a couple of different ways to go down. One of them leads to the final floor with the way out. The reset results in you taking the stairs back to the fourth floor. It felt it be a little cruel to send the player all the back to floor one that deep in. Since they could be good fifteen or more minutes are already spent trying to get through this level.
Finding the right path is also a trial and error approach the player will have to go. This is not one where you are trying to solve any clues to work out which way is forward. I even made some slight changes in the way I was doing things to make some areas stick out more than others. Anyone who never read this post surely won’t know there is a bit of bait going on. It is however quite slight and I expect most players to not pay much attention to it.
As in most of these posts, I like to show some kind of progression over time as I was working on it. Naturally, I also don’t want to show too much giving away the path correct downward. As such this seemed like the perfect time to change the perceptive and give a top-down view of things.
The fun part of this zone having five floors and this point of view is you don’t know how many floors are being shown in this screenshot. I will say it’s more than just one.
Sometimes slight adjustments would have to be made to make the floors line up in the way I wanted them to such as leaving enough height for the proper ceiling. Thankfully in Unreal Engine 4, I can just change my perspective to side views such as left or right, and be able to select the different layers or parts to move around what I needed.
Over time things started connecting. Some of the floors even have more than one correct path forward. I have always enjoyed it when there is more than one way to do something in a game.
The point of view is becoming quite deceitful at this point. It just looks like I’m adding more hallways and rooms to a single floor. I also go back sometimes and just add in something else if I feel more is needed on the floor above.
This is the final view of the zone once everything has been put in. Before now I only had the floor and a couple of side walls in place to judge the distance between floors and ceilings. This view is quite messy as you do have some overhang from wall overlaps or celling.
This map point of view is not available in-game. This is just from my viewport in Unreal Engine itself as I work on the zone. I have played around with adding a map system before and could never get anything to turn out the way I wanted.
Final Thoughts
From creating a zone point of view it’s always fun t to make it around something different than you are used to doing. For the most part, I did not have to worry about making enough room for stairways connecting between the different floors. This in a way gave me the freedom to play around with having quite a few s floors in the zone. Which I tend to stay away from doing as I hate making staircases!
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.
Game roadmap.
