My level design consists of one outdoor environment in an open world format, similar to Animal Crossing.

The main areas of interest are the player’s house, a pumpkin patch, the graveyard, a mausoleum, and a secret alchemist shop in the woods. Some smaller areas include a pond, the river around the environment, and a bridge into town (which won’t lead to a new area, instead it will be the end of the game).

I began by making some simple sketches of the layout, as well as some more detailed images of the main points of interest

After rough sketching, I moved to drawing my layout on graph paper to get a sense of scale for my level.

I want the design to be similar to a “tutorial” for the game.

Players begin on the doorstep of Meeko’s home, then are led to the pumpkin patch to learn how to farm and pick pumpkins. Once they are done, they continue to the graveyard where they retrieve their tools stored in the mausoleum. Then, they care for the tombstones by cleaning them. After they’ve been cleaned, they are able to meet the skeleton resident of that grave!

When all of their main tasks are completed, the player is free to roam and explore. Taking the bridge to town will end the “tutorial” and the game.

After I created these maps and designed the level flow, I moved to Maya to model my environment in basic shapes.

Finally, after some scaling problems (my Maya defaulted to centimeters instead of meters…ouch), I brought my level into Unity and tested it with the third person controller!

I tried to mimic the camera angle a bit despite not actually having a locked perspective. I think it helped to get a better idea of how the game will actually be played!