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Year: 2025

Genre: Shooter

Engine: Unity

Duration: 1 month

Team Size: 1

Platform: PC (Itch.io)

Verdant Mirewoods is a simple shooting game level for a level design course, where the idea was to build a fully functional game level within one month starting from text based design document and ending up with a fully playable level.

I decided to make a level full of foliage and water features to test out different tools inside unity to challenge myself into making something worth showing off later down the line. I ended up coming with up with a cliffside with many corridors, rocks and green elements.

Layout

The layout was drawn fairly fast using the text based design document i made early on during the process. I wanted it to have a good amount of elevation changes as some of my earlier designs lacked such additions.

This layout was eventually changed a bit with the help of feedback i got from the blockmesh phase of the process, where there was confusion and gameplay duration issues regarding to the assignment.

Blockmesh

The blockmesh was built ontop of a plain with the layout on it, to make it mostly accurate to original design as possible, here the elevation comes into view way more than earlier. I made majority of the level using the unity probuilder plugin, as such i ran into some slight issues when dealing with some of its functionality.

This is also when i decided to add the water materials to their proper spots to further showcase the level elements to the feedback givers during the first and second blockmesh iteration steps.

During the blockmesh iteration phase i added another section when i realized the level wasn't long enough for the assignment. This is also when i began working on adding the playablity to the level such as walking, jumping, shooting and dying mechanics.

Shaders

This is when i made the pixelation shader to add more of a style for the level, it was done fairly simply by dividing the pixels that the camera can see to get the desired effect. I made it so that the pixelation can be easily modified in the editor to get the value just right.

The outcome was this look, which is about 180 on the pixelation scale, it makes the level and the game itself look lot more retro and it can hide imperfections that are the results of using the probuilder for level construction.

Textures and Decor

For the textures i went with a fairly basic textures as the level didn't need massively high quality textures to look good, the end goal was to make it work thematically with the design concepts.

For the decor i used many different trees, rocks made with probuilders, logs and plants to make a believable areas. This is best seen in the canyon room, where i used bridge assets and trees to diversify the gameplay.

Majority of the latter parts of the process was polishing the design and its playablity, especially with the newly added sections after the canyon room, I had many people playtest the level to make certain it worked how i intended and the players could find their way around the level using the subtle clues in the design, such as lighting to highlight important places such as the buttons to open gates.

Enemies

When i began making enemies for this game i went with 2D sprites in a 3D world so that i could reuse unused assets from another project and it allowed me to further experiment with pixel art. The game has 3 enemies, a simple skeletal head that rams into the player dealing damage, a very basic enemy that simply exists that you have something moving to shoot at.

The second enemy was an eye turret, that shoots out projectiles that go directly where the player was when the shot was launched, making them interesting to dodge, they can be used to destroy skull enemies they hit. I used them to force the player to constantly keep moving. This is best seen in a corridor section with multiple turret enemies lining the walls.

The third and final enemy is the final boss, which is a glorified larger turret enemy with faster firerate, more health and 3 turrets that constantly spin around the boss arena forcing the player to keep moving. Killing the boss opens the path to the end of the level.

The player detection was the most interesting part to program, i made it so that it could be easily visualized inside the editor for testing purposes as seen below.

This is the final topdown screenshot of the level with and without the shaders, to showcase the level fully, it takes just about 4-5 minutes to beat if you know what you are doing. This design assignment overall helped me get a better idea on level design and how to do it following correct methods.