Divided Skies

Divided Skies is a Third Person VTOL flying game in which you complete missions, explore the map and fight enemies and learn about the character

Project information

My Contributions

  • Project Duration: 32(8,8,8,8) weeks
  • Team size: 20 – 30
  • Role: System Design, (Technical) Level Design
  • Engine: Unreal Engine 5
  • Status: Available on Steam
  • Creation of Test levels
  • Creation of Modular parts for level creation
  • Creation of speed up rings
  • Creation of Exploding barrels
  • Creating of Forcefields
  • Creation of Rotating Propellers and Statue
  • Creation of Breakable walls(shooting or explosives)
  • Mission Design
  • Traffic Placement
  • Improvement of the Collisions
  • Solving issues related to static meshes

Level Design

Worked on assisting the System and Level designers with ideas and small test levels to assist with creating the 3C’s. Worked on cleaning up the collision, and determining the traffic routes inside of the level.

Creating test levels to allow early challenges to be made to gain a better understanding of the movement options. And possible gameplay scenario’s, which assisted in the creation of the 3C’s. Iterated on the test levels and used my newly created LD Ingredients to improve them.

Placed down and made Iterations  on the traffic lanes placement inside of the game. And adjusted them to flow well into each other and reduce the amount of weird turns of the traffic vehicles.

Made changes to the collisions of many of the static meshes of the level to reduce the strain on performance (reducing vertices). And allow the player to have more options on how they want to fly throughout the level.

Created a new level and iterated on it to help the team gain a better understanding on what fun is and used the feedback received from the previous levels to improve it.

Created modular pieces with interchangeable parts that could be placed in a quick manner, after which iterations could be applied to it. The focus of the building blocks were to speed up the level creation and reduce the workload of the artist.

Level Design Ingredients

Created a Door LD Ingredient to allow for interesting opening and door closing events to be made, which would allow for interesting scenario’s to take place(player can’t escape the fight), or allow for special missions to take place(steal valued objects). This would work well with the consoles and power core systems. The door could also be used in a slow closing manner, allowing the player to feel like they just narrowly went through the door that was closing, and escaped.

Created forcefields to allow for interesting scenario’s to take place(player can’t escape the fight). Or allow for special missions to take place(steal valued object), this would work well with the consoles and power core systems. The forcefields could also be used to block areas the player wasn’t allowed to go to yet.

Created Power cores System to allow the player to have an objective to destroy the power cores. Afterwards an event would occur(doors/forcefields opening, enemies spawning and attacking, cutscenes). This could give the player a cool feeling of achieving their objective and allowing the start of an escape sequence or enemy attack.

Created Console System to allow the player to have an object to destroy. Afterwards  doors, forcefields or other events could be called upon. This could give the player a fun feeling of deactivating the defences of a facility when trying to either enter/escape it.

Created Moving platforms that would allow for the player to dodge them and gain a feeling of narrowly avoiding crashing, and add additional challenge for the player to face.

Created destroyable walls which allowed the player to either shoot to destroy the weak wall, or use an explosive to blow up the stronger wall. This allowed the player to be surprised by what they would discover behind the destructible walls, and allow them to open up new pathways through the level.

Created Explosives that could hurt the player and enemies in close range allowing the player to use the explosive in an offensive manner, while having to watch out for shooting it when close. The explosive allowed for blowing up stronger destructible walls giving the player an incentive, to explore the map and create new pathways through the level.

Created Rotating Propeller to challenge the players movement skills and give them the feeling of narrowly avoiding crashing. The propellers also functioned well with the Games Art direction that was chosen.

Created Loop Rings to allow for the player to get a speed boost when entering the highways of the city and travel faster along it and give them the feeling of traveling fast on the highway.

Created collectables to give the player an incentive and reward for exploring the map. This also provided a secondary goal of getting all the collectables.

Created rotating statue after VA requested it to be made. This improved the feeling of the central area, as a busy and more lively location, compared to when the statue would be stationary.

Planning

During the planning stages I assisted in making some quick test levels and LD Ingredients for the project. And pitched some ideas from games I was familiar with which had VTOL elements in them.

Documentation and Pipelines

The creation of pipelines and documentation was to increase the efficiency of the game creation process and avoid submitting bad bugs. This also helped teammates to quickly find where ideas came from and what the reasons for decisions made were. In addition I created some documents to assist the Visual Artists and Level/System designers to understand what an LD Ingredient would do, and some information on how it could visually look and where it can be used.

Research

I researched multiple things, especially in the beginning, I assisted with the open world and missions research. My most researched topics were, how the traffic System would work, and operate and research/ideas regarding the LD Ingredients. In the beginning I researched a multitude of flying games(which had VTOL or similar flying feeling) and looked at what obstacles/LD Ingredients were introduced in these games.

Playtesting and Iteration

I focused on iterating on the LD Ingredients and Traffic systems and made sure that issues/bugs related to it would be quickly solved. This was done by first testing myself, afterwards my teammates or play testers would playtest the game. Subsequently I would work on the bugs assigned/belonging to the systems I created.

Experience of the Project

Throughout this project I learned how to keep the LD Ingredients I made, up to date, with the changing 3C’s of the character. Additionally I learned how to create building blocks for level creation, to reduce the workload of the artists and speed up the level design process.