Robits

Lead Level Designer

November 2018 - June 2019

Robits is a 3D top-down isometric educational game that centers around building and programming robots in order to accomplish a series of challenges and battle your way to the end of the level. You play as Zoe, a character in a futuristic cyberpunk universe.

Robits is a game created by 11 team members and was developed over a period of 8 months.

As the level designer for this project, my work included:

Developing layouts for a corrupt and conglomerate corporate facility that manufactures robots, working with the design lead to create a layout that made sense with the game's combat encounters.
Collaborating with 3D artist John Khaw, on creating an asset list as well as environmental design to fill up empty spaces
Collaborating with VFX artist Luke Mason, on incorporating a lot of the special effects such as fog lighting, decals, and other things that gave the level the artistic juice.
Collaborating with UI & Lead Artist Tristan Burnside, who gave me pointers on lighting as well as how to give the level the proper aesthetic we wanted.

Robits was awarded the Innovation Award and nominated for Best Art at UC Santa Cruz's 2019 Games Showcase!

You can check out the Robits website here where you can meet the rest of the team and play the game yourself!

The Design Process

To begin my level design workflow, I looked at reference and took inspiration from other games within the same genre. One of my favorite games that properly conveyed a futuristic universe is Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. Being set in the future, it gave off the perfect aesthetic.

I still needed to answer the question: What is cyberpunk? Mirror's Edge: Catalyst provides the answer to futurism but what does it mean for a universe to be cyberpunk exactly? To answer that question I looked at an upcoming game that wasn't released at the time of development: CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077.

After researching both of these games and studying their artistic choices, I was able to provide myself a definition of Cyberpunk:
Cyberpunk is a genre that involves the obsession of computer technology in a dystopian and corrupt futuristic society.

I had to come up with a color palette that I would stay consistent with. Cyberpunk colors usually contain a lot of vibrant blues, reds, pinks, and greens so I decided that I must incorporate them in my level.

These are the paper/whiteboard prototypes of the 2D maps that I created and iterated on throughout the development cycle (you can click on each image to expand them). The order of each prototype is from left to right.

The level begins in an alleyway/street in which the character has to break into the building by punching a vent after climbing some stairs. They then go through a series of rooms to find robot parts to test their skills within the arena at the end. Initially, the level was set up in this way such that in each room, the player finds a robotic component that they can add onto their robot companion but after some design meetings we decided that in each room we wanted to have the player's robot fight another robot and THEN receive the component. This made things tricky because our programming team didn't have our combat system nailed yet so I couldn't test the level for balancing/flow issues. I had to figure out where should I place health pads and checkpoints based on the game's difficulty.

I worked with one of the designers on my team, David Kirkpatrick, to create the 3rd and final layout. It accomplished the encounter design experience we were looking for and it resolved a level design problem that I go into detail just down below.

The game was initially set to be in 3rd person but me and my team discussed whether we should change our camera system to top-down isometric. Our team was split among what we wanted but we decided to go with the top-down isometric view. This changed the way I had to design the levels. Since the camera is now angled, I have to be mindful of where I place important assets in the level. Initially, in some rooms, the player could not see behind a wall which meant that they could not see where they are going. This was fixed when one of the programmers, Zack Lawrence, developed a Blueprint that would make walls become transparent when it is between the player and the camera. You can see an example of this on the right.

I still faced another design problem: Player's can't see what's ahead if they are walking south (towards the camera). I had to change the way the level layout should be now! I looked at a Cyberpunk game called RUINER which had exactly the same camera angle as my game. I noticed that in RUINER, enemies would mostly come from the northern side of the screen. This way the player knew what to expect and weren't surprised. This lead to layout #3 (see the whiteboard concept above) where the level was designed in a way such that the camera of the player always progressed north; This layout was not finalized and we made adjustments after playtest feedback This essentially solved the design problem I had.

(RUINER gameplay reference)

Here are a couple of pictures when the level was still in it's graybox stage.

Final layout after art pass

I want to give credit to two of my team members, John Khaw and Luke Mason for their work on the Office and the Final Arena, where they were able to use their skills to transform these blockouts into beautiful spaces.

Here is the office space in the level that was used as sort of a "break" from the combat. I had the idea of converting this blockmeshed layout into an office room for the player to explore. John worked diligently with his adept 3D modeling expertise to quickly create office equipment assets to bring the idea to life. Luke helped create the decals such as the paper on the floor, the whiteboard drawings, the computer UI (that is animated but isn't shown in the image) as well as the sticky notes on the corkscrew board.

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Here is the final boss arena encounter. My job in this part of the game was layout. I also helped assist with lighting.

John and Luke worked together to bring concept images from various different sources; They created sketches, placed elements, and placed decals. I was tasked with lighting from Tristan so I researched what smaller finer detailing I could do to give it the extra polish.

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Robits

Lead Level Designer

November 2018 - June 2019

Developing layouts for a corrupt and conglomerate corporate facility that manufactures robots, working with the design lead to create a layout that made sense with the game's combat encounters.

Collaborating with 3D artist John Khaw, on creating an asset list as well as environmental design to fill up empty spaces

Collaborating with VFX artist Luke Mason, on incorporating a lot of the special effects such as fog lighting, decals, and other things that gave the level the artistic juice.

Collaborating with UI & Lead Artist Tristan Burnside, who gave me pointers on lighting as well as how to give the level the proper aesthetic we wanted.

Robits was awarded the Innovation Award and nominated for Best Art at UC Santa Cruz's 2019 Games Showcase! You can check out the Robits website here where you can meet the rest of the team and play the game yourself!