The Willful Weapon

An ambitious first person shooter demo that I started once I finished school. I worked on this during my free time with the goal to improve my level design workflow and familiarize myself further with my main engine, Unreal Engine.

Although not finalized yet, this project has been very educational and it has taught me a lot. To get an idea of what I've been doing you can follow the process thus far in the images further down on this page.

Once the goal with the project was clearly defined, the rest of the pre-production phase was spent carefully thinking through and planning out what specifically to do, and how to do it, before starting to put it together.

01 TWW level design process - Insert level sketch ref in engine.PNG

I drew up a floorplan on checkered paper, featuring various level design elements commonly featured in modern FPS games to practice on what industry professionals do. Once ready I imported the sketch into the scene.

02 player scale reference creating modular whitebox assets with measurements based on player scale.PNG

For consistency and efficiency, I created a set of modular geometry pieces such as walls, doorways, covers, etc. I made sure to set the snapping to match these pieces, and used a player reference to get the scale right.

03 whiteboxing on top of sketch Building from the lowest point.PNG

I used the pre-made building blocks to start the blockout / greybox, building the very first iteration of the level on top of the imported sketch.

04 Using wireframe view to see from side, above etc and utilize tools to get exact measurements and fit INSTA.jpg

In addition to the use of snapping to ensure that pieces fit together perfectly I regularly observed the environment through various views and windows, with the top-down wireframe view being particularly useful.

05 placing obstacles, covers, ventilations and other things that fill a function to the gameplay 2.PNG

05 placing obstacles, covers, ventilations and other things that fill a function to the gameplay 5.PNG

05 placing obstacles, covers, ventilations, COLUMNS PILLARS and other things that fill a function to the gameplay 6 INSTA.jpg

Once the larger, fundamental geometry such as floor, walls and doorways were in I shifted focus for a first pass of putting in smaller geometry like covers and other environmental assets that affect the FPS gameplay.

06 finished whiteboxing v1 ready for adding playtesting elements, event triggers and placi

06 finished whiteboxing v1 ready for adding playtesting elements, event triggers and placing of enemies and navmeshes 3.PNG

Once the first iteration of the blockout was completed it was time for the functional side of things, putting in event triggers, enemy spawn triggers, interactable elements and a functional, completable mission objective.

Once everything was functional and the demo could be played from start to finish (first playable) a period of playtesting and iteration followed, improving upon the design and overall experience before starting to polish it up.

00 test scene - testing props doing some minor adjustments to textures etc.JPG

Using asset packs from the Unreal Engine marketplace I started replacing my placeholder geometry with environmental art. I made a test scene first to pin down what assets to use and how to use them.

01b - To save time I duplicate sequences of room pieces that have doorways, lights, pillars etc pre-placed and aligned correctly.JPG

For the sake of efficiency I made preset rooms and corridors with lighting that I could easily duplicate, move around and modify to speed up the process of replacing the blockout with proper environment art.

...and this is where this project is at currently. Since I started working professionally in the industry, both during office hours and in my free time, this project has been put on ice (for now). I hope to return to this eventually and finish it since I have quite enjoyed working on it and learned a lot.

NOTE: In the presented workflow above I have purposefully not disclosed a lot of the work involved in order to primarily focus on the level design-related work and process.