Draconic Destiny is a game that I worked on as a part of my Capstone Project for my fourth year of the Sheridan College Bachelor of Game Design. During the entire fourth and final year of the program, we choose our own teams and work on a single project. The end goal is to demonstrate our ability to work on a game as a team and meet specified requirements by a given deadline. My team decided to work on this project after some brainstorming because we enjoyed the idea, and we felt it was a good way to experiment with new skills. For this project, I took on the role of Level Designer. This was my first project that I used the Unreal Engine’s Landscaping tools to create a map.
The game itself is an open world ‘collectathon’. Players take on the role of a mighty dragon, who wants to rule over the land with an iron claw. The player can explore a large landscape to search for hidden treasure, villages to raid, and trolls to fight. The current game is still somewhat simple. We scoped down our project towards the end of the year, but it was still successful in accomplishing our goal for what we wanted in a game.
The level itself contains some traces of the original ideas we had planned, however. My focus when creating the level was to have the world become more interesting and varied as the player travels further from their starting point, the nest. While the world was not as large as we had planned, I was still able to get across this concept in the design, having dense forested areas at the corners of the map, where a lot more treasure was hidden. The villages were also planned to have a level of interaction as well, beyond just attacking them. I placed the villages in places that were meant to create space between them, so the player couldn’t keep an eye on all of them at once. Some are also closer to the nest than others, incentivising players to prioritize them, as well as making it easy for new players to discover this mechanic.
Another big part of the level was adding small details to attract the player to certain spots. I would create elevated platforms to draw players in, then place treasure there as a reward. This would give players a small vantage point, as well as encourage them to look for similar terrain in the future. Treasure would also be placed in small corners at the edges of the map, encouraging players to not just search within larger, more open areas.
There are some details of the level I would like to change. The more open areas have very large hills, and some of them can feel unnatural. I attempted to create pathways between the villages, but it was more difficult than I thought to create natural feeling roadways that go in between hills. I also would have liked to add more detail to the wall of mountains surrounding the map. Some players enjoyed exploring that area, but it was easy to get stuck. I’m still torn between making it more easy to explore, or making it more imposing to scare people away.
Overall, it was great to experiment with the landscape tool. I learned a lot about how the tool itself works, as well as how to make smooth and compelling open world levels. While it’s not the perfect level, and there are some things I would like to tweak, I still feel it’s a strong showcase of my skills and my willingness to learn new things.