FIEA Level Dev Blog

This past week was spring break at GDC. Even though I'm originally from San Francisco, this was actually my first time attending GDC. It was a cool experience getting to drive people from our cohort around the city and show them some of my favorite spots. I tried speed networking a few times, it was kind of hit or miss, but the most interesting conversations I had were with people adjacent to level design. Funny enough, I didn’t meet any other level designers during speed networking, but I did connect with a couple of environment artists and a tech designer, and we had some really good talks. The FIEA reunion was a highlight. I got to meet a lot of alumni and former faculty who were super welcoming and open to talking about breaking into the industry. One of the best moments was when we ended up at another bar after the reunion, where alumni Marchand introduced Greg, Cameron, and me to level designers from Obsidian some of whom were also FIEAns. They shared a lot of helpful advic...

 This past week, the biggest thing I worked on aside from finishing my level was reworking my portfolio and creating a web page for my level. Before that, I made a final push to complete the horde encounter that serves as the climax of my level. Getting the enemy AI to behave the way I wanted was a challenge. It was mostly about staging the encounter to work visually rather than having fully functional AI. Since the enemies were aggressive and difficult to fight, and I didn’t have a proper checkpoint system in place, I ended up setting their damage to 0. This way, playtesters could get through the level with the right amount of friction without constantly dying. For the portfolio, I focused on production value while keeping the styling consistent with both TLOU2 and my own portfolio’s style guide. I took inspiration from TLOU2 's Seattle map and designed my level’s top-down map to resemble a physical tourist map of San Francisco, then placed it on a mock-up of a creased piece of...