Dreadhurst Manor 2 - Basement Section

 Yes, you read that right. After 2 years of threats (!), I am indeed remaking my first ever project. 

Addressing the elephant in the room, yes. Dreadhurst Manor is a very edgy title, don't worry, more to come on that front later. 

The original version was missing a few things, and one of those was a basement area. I simply didn't know how to properly implement one back then, and now I do. So there is a basement, funny how that works!

While I always try to make the best level design I can, this time, I am taking time to adhere to level design principles I have picked up over the past 2 years.

Basement Layout

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


1. The player starts here, the tunnel leading into the basement is a stair case leading down, in the tunnel the basement/manor will be loaded/unloaded.

2. An elevator used for large objects is here, it will connect to the ground floor of the manor. 

3. A power station room, a large electrical box here will have 3 wires that extrude from it and leave the room, serving as the puzzle

4. A waterlogged room with a fuse box. Each fuse box has a wire that connects directly to the power station room

5. A fuse box inside a locked room

6. A room with a space the player can squeeze through to access the fuse box in the previous room

7. A fuse box in a locked room

8. A powered gate, next to it is an electric box which will indicate how many fuse boxes are active.  

This section is designed to have many tight corridors, this serves to aid atmosphere and increase tension when enemies roam the area. There are multiple rooms that house items and notes, and plenty of potential to add more later. 

The player is likely to either get to the electric gate or power station room first, if the player gets to the gate they will see 3 unpowered bulbs and the power station will show 3 wires leaving it. While not explicitly told, the player will understand what to do. 

Now let's take a deeper look at some of the design choices.

Grey Box Design
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The player enters the basement area and a light indicates a points of interest around the corner.


The player arrives at the elevator and a loading area, with shelves filled with clutter and a desk with all manner of documents and tools.


The player finds a storage area near the loading bay, this is caged off and cannot be entered, pipes indicate a path that can be followed.


The pipes lead to a boiler room, the basement has plenty of rooms like this, that house items like bullets and healing items and lore based notes.


Around the corner is a room where...unpleasant things happen.


Moving on from...that. Outside that room is an area where 'wine' is assembled. Reference mannequins are used throughout the grey box to get a better idea of scaling.


The basement has a couple of segment where the player can crawl under pieces to get away from enemies. 


The power station room is very well lit, making it an obvious reference point for the player, light will bleed out of this room to draw the eye.


A fallen water barrel can be seen as the player nears the waterlogged room.


The waterlogged room has a live electric wire touching the water, this will cause severe damage to the player. The player must activate a switch and has a few seconds to reach the other side. Flipping the fuse box at the end turns off the wire forever and is a puzzle piece for the power box. 


A very tight corridor is seen via pipes, the player can use this to bypass a large part of the map, however it offers little protection from enemies, this can have steam valves that can be turned off later. 


In the 'wine' making room, a very obvious light will lead to the powered gate.


This gate is locked and a power indicator will have 3 bulbs that light up as fuse boxes are switched on and a final bulb for when it is ready to be activated. Behind the gate is a non-descript room and a door, this will open up the cave section. It is presented as impossible space as the cave is significantly larger, however this can be designed to have stairs leading further down into the cave section. 


This is an example of how some of the larger corridor sections use lights to indicate a path further ahead and pipes can indicate walls to follow.


A fuse box is inside this room. The key to the door is found elsewhere in the manor. The player may already have the key to the door, if not this forces the player to remember this door. 


A small break room is placed to separate the storage areas from staff quarter areas. These staff members live in the basement and leave via the elevator to access outside areas. 


A long hall with fans for volumetric lighting and fog creates atmosphere.


A small cabin room for staff offers a quick hiding space in the previous longer hallway. 


A locked room with a fuse box inside is at the end of the hallway, a light is seen further ahead and a caged off area is visible to the player.


Inside the cage is a gap the player can squeeze through. This can be hard to see, but a light on the other side will aid the player. 


Video Breakdown:





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a simple dialogue system in Unreal Engine 5

Image
 Through my early days as a gamedev, I've learned a plethora of neat techniques but there was one that I always wanted to know how to do. A dialogue system. Here is my first attempt at a rudimentary system. This will be redone very soon with more depth. The very first step was to create a interface for Dialogue. Then a duplicated the Third Person Character blueprint and changed the meshes for both.  I made variables for this NPC, the first being an array variant of the string variable. This was give as many options for dialogue as I wanted. Then I created an index variable as an integer to determine in what order the dialogue was spoken. Then a reference to a widget was made. For the string array, I added three elements and added three simple sentences. The Index integer was initialized at -1. This was because the first element of the array began at 0 and the way the code works, we are incrementing the index. Starting it at -1 means we start blank, then move index 0 (the first...
Read more

Remaking Mario in Unreal Engine 5 (Part 1)

Image
 For this project, I aim to remake Mario (or at least as best as I can) in UE5. The project makes sense as, while it is simple, there are a lot of core concepts that are valuable for any newbie game dev. Here is the first part of what I've done so far, which is a lot of set up. Stay tuned for Part 2 soon! The first port of call was to get the camera in position to act as a side scroller.  Here I set parameters, to allow for customization of where the camera goes in real time. This allowed me to find a sweet spot that looked good for the perspective I wanted.  (This ended up looking similar to this) The next step was to set snap layers. This allowed me to set layers for placing assets for the foreground, main play layer and background. This is important because all of the interactable objects would only be in  the middle of the play area and without the snap layers, if they were incorrectly placed, the player may not be able to interact with them. (The snap layer sett...
Read more

Dreadhurst Manor - Project Breakdown

Image
This was my first project, I had spent a couple of months with Unreal Engine 5 and was overconfident. I has followed some tutorials that would encompass the bones of the game. Based on one of my favourite genres, survival horror. I set out to make the best prototype I could.  As a solo project, I handled everything myself and the duration took around 2 months. This is a retrospective 2 years after I made this so forgive some hazy details! First Attempt At Level Design! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As this was my first project I didn't utilise grey boxes correctly. I did a primitive form of grey boxes using basic shapes, but this was before I understood what a portfolio was, so I didn't document things! For simplicity, this is a single level, a 2 floor manor with explorable areas around the perimeter and an exit gate, let's take a look at the level flow, despite me knowing nothing about level design or referencing at the...
Read more