Codename: Pariah
ROLE
Game, Combat, Systems & Level Designer
Producer
DESCRIPTION
Codename: Pariah is a fast-paced First Person Shooter wher the player controls and ethereal being from beyond our solar system. The creature has no weapons or abilities and can't survive outside a host for very long.
Players must use enemies as hosts, turning their own health, weapons and ammo against their comrades in order to escape the facility.
Codename: Pariah was a Major University Project at AIE Melbourne that was nominated for best project.
I was the sole designer and producer on this project.
YEAR
2021
GENRE
Single-Player Action FPS
PLATFORM
PC (Windows)
PROJECT TYPE
Keystone University
LEVEL DESIGN
On this page I will discuss the Level Design choices that I made for this project including features that were ultimately cut from the final version.
Overview
Here are the Key features of the level design that made it into the final product.
Combat Arenas
Pickups gave a soldier hosts the ability to go Assault Rifles Akimbo, but it would remain on the host who grabbed the pickup, making it a tactical choice of when to pick them up and making sure you in a host that can pick them up.
I also worked on the collision for the level design and this was particularly important during combat arenas.
This was completed utilizing both box colliders and simplified geo mesh colliders so that player movement and shooting felt seamless and removed any janky feeling collision.
The decision making also included determining when to remove collision on items that got in the way or use small ramps to make it feel as if you step over smaller items etc.
Collision was the hidden art of making the game feel fun such allowing them to shoot through gaps and climb stairs smoothly.
Puzzles & Level Gates
Pickups gave a soldier hosts the ability to go Assault Rifles Akimbo, but it would remain on the host who grabbed the pickup, making it a tactical choice of when to pick them up and making sure you in a host that can pick them up.
I also worked on the collision for the level design and this was particularly important during combat arenas.
This was completed utilizing both box colliders and simplified geo mesh colliders so that player movement and shooting felt seamless and removed any janky feeling collision.
The decision making also included determining when to remove collision on items that got in the way or use small ramps to make it feel as if you step over smaller items etc.
Collision was the hidden art of making the game feel fun such allowing them to shoot through gaps and climb stairs smoothly.
Vistas
Vistas were used throughout the game for both gameplay and story telling purposes.
In vistas such as the one prior to the Laboratory Arena the player can see into the arena from above, seeing the enemies and the general layout before they get there. i also used the narrow to wide technique with the majority of the gameplay vistas where the player is funneled through tighter spaces before it opens up to the vista.
For the narrative vistas such as the one below, i used both the narrow-wide technique as well as placing them in an already wide area during a longer section of narrow to expand and break up the level.
I found this was important to do in incidental spaces between arenas so that players could see outside the facility over the dwarf Planet Ceres and understand it's place in the asteroid belt.
Pickups
Pickups gave soldier hosts the ability to go Assault Rifles Akimbo, but it would remain on the host who grabbed the pickup, making it a tactical choice of when to pick them up and requires the player to be in the correct type of host to make that tactical choice.
For Level Design this meant that placement had be obvious so that players knew they were when entering an arena but placed in such a way that it would be a deliberate choice the player made to pick it up and it could be avoided until the opportune moment.
Below's image is where the item is placed during the tutorial so this is designed to be unavoidable as you enter the arena.
Checkpoints & Resource Management
Stasis Pods refill the Player health between arenas, with puzzles used to get them into new hosts with a new pool of Health/Ammo a new host before the next arena.
These Stasis Pods were introduced between the tutorial section and the Laboratory arena in a smaller enclosed spaced so they couldn't be missed.
For the ones before the Final arena i went through multiple iterations to get these to work well as I started off with them on a lower level, about a meter down from the main floor section but players ignored them.
Eventually the were the first thing you saw in the vista room and surround the pillar as the central feature of the room so even if you got distracted by the vista you would have another chance to see them before the elevator jump to the final arena.
Tutorial
The Tutorial was the last area I designed and spent multiple weeks getting it right, even then i know a few aspects that i'd do differently if I were to build this again.
In my opinion the arena I built at the end of the tutorial in the reactor room is the best arena that made it into the final game and that was after it originally was the worst by far.
It's no perfect but the pipes you can slide under, the verticality with the catwalks and the lowered areas makes the character controller shine and accentuates the combat.
It really feels like that and the previous room in the cargo elevator room where I introduce the Soldier enemy type are the peak of the level.
The one thing that both of these areas had was multiple versions and time to just play around moving things and kit-bashing the greybox until it felt good. With these i was able to try something fresh where as the others we had some sunk cost fallacy that i feel like resulted in a worse experience.
For the most part the introduction of mechanics such as jumping, double jump, exiting and entering hosts and crouch sliding worked well in this tutorial as i dedicated small sections to each before combining them toward the end of the tutorial.
Cut Features
Below are the cut features that were in place during the production of this game that level design work was done on that ultimately didn't make it into the final product.
Environmental Dangers
Using our previous project Bellum Apparatus as a test bed for Explosive Red Barrel tech we had always planned to get environmental dangers into the game and had the script ready to add.
Unfortunately due to performance issues with the AI and lighting alongside delays in the behaviour system that tied up the programmer of the Red Barrel script this never actually made it in the final build. The red barrels (canisters) would chain and send the canisters across the room to explode which made for a tactical choice as it wasn't just the initial area of effect but a series of explosions that could decimate a group of enemies or cause a careless player to have a canister explode in their face.
The other major environmental danger was containers in the Portal Arena, which the player was to shoot the chain/hook and have it drop as cover or on enemies.
Unfortunately whilst everything was ready for these I was tied up with lighting issues which hindered my ability to get these working in the final version.
As a result the red barrels and the containers have been placed in the level as part of my level design but they are non-functional and the lack of cover in the final arena that was supposed to be dynamic make the arena feel empty in places.
Monster Closets
As this game was heavily inspired by Doom and Wolfenstein the original plan was to have monster closest to extend the length and change the pace mid battle in each arena.
This was something that was designed into the Laboratory Arena as the first arena built but as it was subsequently cut at the suggestion of the team at Sledgehammer Games Melbourne who were giving us feedback at each milestone these were cut from the rest of the game.
The doors that would open around the arena remained closed but the central lift in the center of the arena stayed as it added a way to change the arena mid battle once the player had eliminated a certain percentage of live enemies in the arena.
In hindsight I woulds have like to added a pickup in the platform as it rose as a way of better integrating that mechanic into this combat space without using the same strategy of having it available to player immediately upon entering the arena.
Looking back now whilst it was the correct decision to remove them I would have like the option to add monster closets as way of increasing difficulty, intensity and pacing of the arenas especially for those that had other cut features.
Incidental Combat Spaces
Pickups gave soldier hosts the ability to go Assault Rifles Akimbo, but it would remain on the host who grabbed the pickup, making it a tactical choice of when to pick them up and requires the player to be in the correct type of host to make that tactical choice.
For Level Design this meant that placement had be obvious so that players knew they were when entering an arena but placed in such a way that it would be a deliberate choice the player made to pick it up and it could be avoided until the opportune moment.
Below's image is where the item is placed during the tutorial so this is designed to be unavoidable as you enter the arena.
Enemy Turrets
Double Barreled Shotgun
Breakable Glass
Boss Battle
Additional Arena
Level Design Diagrams
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Level Design Documents
For this Project I was limited in time as the only designer or production person on the team, so it was suggested that greyboxing my levels would be given an initial pass by the 2 environment artists that I would then iterate on in engine.
To best communicate what I would have normally greyboxed myself, I created a series of 1 page level design documents as seen in the example before. Unlike most design documents I found these were actually referenced by the artists.
I found these took some time and whilst I'm not sure it was shorter than doing the greybox myself they did help in ensuring everyone was on the same page in terms of scale and heights, reducing the issues I'd seen in just providing a 2D level diagram.
POST-MORTEM IMPROVEMENTS IDEAS
Realtime Lighting
Baked Lighting caused me a bunch of issues during the final weeks of production between the version of the engine, the Unity HDRP pipeline and the fact I had an RTX graphics card.
I lost weeks of time in the engine whilst rendering and attempting to troubleshoot, then the end result never looked as good as it did using realtime rendered lights.
Whilst the move to baked was for the performance benefit, I would look at other options in terms of lighting including another engine such as UE5 or have a dedicated lighting artist.
Combine Arenas
One of my favourite arenas got culled after blocking as the level was to large for the time we had available. Unfortunately as I was the only designer my time was incredibly limited and due to the time constraints I have didn't have time to take what I had from it and use it elsewhere.
My least favourite arena was the final arena as it was built around a boss battle and environmental hazards that eventually were cut. Without them it felt very empty after getting over the spectacle of the space.
Knowing what I know now I'd combine both of these into a tighter arena that uses the basic layout of the cut arena with the portal itself, the vista reveal entrance to the arena and the double jump bridge with the akimbo pickup.
Missing Weighted Agent Nodes
We had some tech issues with our AI behaviour system and lost a behaviour where I could weight nodes so that enemies would guard areas in combat.
This meant that multiple aspects of my intended level design didn't really end up working without that feature such as the vent system as really didn't work any more and was never used by players in combat as it was originally intended.
It also meant that I didn't do any iteration on the vents to make them better so their final appearance ended up being pointless in arenas and only used by players in puzzles
The lack of the ability to weight guarding areas also meant that the enemies were constantly trying to get close to you instead of engaging from longer ranges.
The level were design for Doom Eternal like combat but without the behaviours we'd designed from the outset of the game the combat felt a little 2 dimensional and allowed players to repeatedly shepherd enemies into favourable situations which felt cheap and subtracted from the level design as players end up cheesing the game.
This lack of AI abilities felt very obvious in the final arena.
Knowing what I do now I would have like to have solved this a different way earlier rather than waiting on tech that ultimately never came.
Add Laser Gates
The Elevator Puzzle didn't end up working as the player could remain in their original host. I needed a way to kill the host the host in the elevator on the way down so the player is forced to evacuate that host and enter into a new one inside the final arena.
I test a bunch of ideas but none worked, only after we had finished the project i figured out that we could have had a laser gate that the ethereal being can pass through but not hosts.
This would also have made for a good puzzle early on either before or after the reactor fight as a way to introduce the gates and reinforce host jumping.
These gates could have also been used in arenas toward the end of the level to increase the difficulty without more enemies.
