LOOKDEV: Power Plant Planning

Here we will briefly run through how we improved our levels and what was learnt from designing two different versions of our second level, the Power Plant — an industrial, Sci-fi area, populated with Scouts, our enemy bots.

We will also touch upon how we searched and sourced for visual references to help our artists describe the space.

Below is the first plan for the Power Plant; We liked how the space offers the player the chance to flee from Scouts, evade environmental hazards like the pistons and learn about the traversal mechanic; however, it did not offer them a chance to freely explore the power plant at their leisure.

The play path is very linear, and there’s no opportunity to leave, and search around rooms along your way. Once you have made a decision to leave a floor, you cannot head back down. We found that this limited the enjoyability of the level, thus we endeavored to improve upon this in the next iteration.

We found this next plan solved a lot of the issues that were encountered before by:

• Adding additional rooms for the player to explore, such as the Crane Hangar which gives you a mission status and solidifies why the player is doing what they are doing.

• Creating a more thoughtful path of exploration throughout the space by allowing the player to traverse ladders and through tunnels; the building is no longer two squares on top of each other, but structurally sound and explorable!
• There’s consideration for enemy locations; how to use Scouts to teach the player, or increase tension.
• Puzzle locations have been planned out, and have dedicated separate rooms, below and above the centre space, so the path is no longer linear.
• Thanks to feedback, I have included environmental traps and hazards to avoid, so that the Scouts aren’t the only danger in the power plant.

While planning the plant, we sourced an array of images so that we could learn how to plan a Power Plant space. This was difficult to conceptualise as it’s easy to, for example, plan a level in a space you frequent day to day, like a house, or a church or a supermarket. But — not a lot of folks have visited a power plant before, thus it took a lot of research to make sure that the space ‘read’ power plant well, and not factory, or some other generic building.

To make sure that the model was factually correct, a bunch of images were sourced of a nuclear power station in Arizona, and mirrored the internal hangar which is the heart of the building.

Having these art and photography references also meant that once the 3D team started planning which props would populate the space, they had a guide to work with. Making sure the the research and development of level design is thorough gives the project a strong foundation and a language for describing which conceptual or unfamiliar objects will fill the space.