Celestia

April 2023 - May 2023

Role(s):

Level Designer, Game Designer, Programmer/Scripter

Tools(s):

Unreal Engine

Celestia is a project made for GAM607 - Action Adventure & RPG Level Design, a course at Academy of Art University. This project was built in Unreal Engine 4 over the span of 4 weeks and served as an exercise for designing a larger scale RPG level experience.

Action-Adventure RPG | Creating a Compelling Narrative to Enhance Environment

I aimed to create a narrative-driven story inspired by games like Kingdom Hearts, and structured around the
“Hero’s Journey,” so a dialogue system and basic combat was implemented as well.

Celestia Project Map | Solidifying Level Design

Before working in engine, I created a drawn map of the overall layout of the level with accompanying annotations for the gameplay's story beats. With RPG's often being large in scale, creating this map helped in scoping the level's scale down to an achievable degree for this project.

Celestia Reference Sheet | Inspiration for Design

Creating a reference sheet helped me get an idea of what kind of assets would need to be modeled and blocked out, making the environment's theme readable to players.

Pushing Storytelling | Implementing a Dialogue System

One of the more time consuming elements, I implemented an interactable dialogue system for the player to interact with. Using custom structures and enumerators in UE4, each conversation could be treated as a variable, tied to an NPC actor, and called when interacted with by the player.

Putting the Action in Adventure | Creating a Combat System

While the primary focus of the project was its level design, I still wanted the player to interact with the world in more ways than dialogue. In the later half of gameplay, enemies appear so I thought it best to provide the player with a way to defeat them. I took this as an opportunity to delve into animation blueprints and blend the attack animation with the movement animations.