Level Design Prototyping Study: Rescuing The Captain

The game designer Jiantao Hu made a UE4 prototype of third person shooting game level design. The purpose of the game is to find captain katya and rescue her. In this game, the developer designed approximately two puzzles and five challenges. The two puzzles include how to open the gate, and looking for the correct way to find the captain. The five challenges contain passing the rotating platform, killing the spider robot, estimating the correct path to find the captain, finding and rescuing the captain within three minutes, and avoiding losing all health points. The game designer built the game environment in the unreal engine and he used the rock wall texture(Titus Tscharntke, 2016) for all models in the environment.

To design the prototype more efficiently, he designed a basic user experience graph below, which illustrates the process of the game play.

There are many games having the mission of rescuing, such as Medal of honor and Call of Duty. The game background is based on the Chernobyl disaster. In the game level, there are several nuclear affected spiders controlling a nuclear destructed hospital building. Marine captain Katya is stuck in the hospital. The player needs to enter the hospital to find and rescue the captain.

The gate is the first puzzle for the player, if players cannot figure out how to open the door, they cannot go to the next level. In this game, there are two walls obstacle the players. According To The Design, The player will find that they cannot directly open the door when walking to it. The player needs to find out the key that opens door. The two walls beside the door will make the player feel hard to analyse the location of the key.

However, when controlling the character to walk to the door and turn around, they will find the behind wall on the right is different from the behind wall on the left.

When pressing “tab,” the character would take out the gu. The player would see the red dot when aiming at the enemy spider robot.

When shooting the enemy spider robot, the door opens.

To make the puzzle, the game designer follows the guidance of the Lecture four to make the “tin can,” “modified player” and a gate in the current project. The modified player is the character that player controls, the tin can is the enemy actor that character will shoot. The designer imported the robot spider fbx which he created by himself from his assessment of Advanced Modelling to the project and added it to the tin can. He also added a box collision that can harm the modified player.

With the blueprint function of the tin can, modified player and the gate. The player can control the modified player to shoot the tin can, or make the gate open the door in some ways.

In the game, the character has three minutes to finish the mission, otherwise, the character will die.

To make this function, it is essential to have a countdown timer, so the designer edited a countdown timer blueprint in the Third Person Game Mode as well as the Timer UI Widget with the help of Devsquad’s “Create A Game Match Timer.” (VirtusEdu, 2016) To make the UI countdown the number, the designer created bindings “Get Tex t0” and “Get Text 1” for both “TimeMin” and “TimeSec.”

With the guidance of the tutorial “Count Down Timer With Game Over”(VirtusEdu, 2016.) The game designer modified the countdown timer blueprint in the Third Person Game Mode. He set the TimeMin to two and TimeSecond to 60, which means the game will run for three minutes, and the the game will stop when three minutes are run over.

To make the character survive in the level, the player needs to collect health points.

To make the whole process work, the designer set up the target score UI for health and the pick up coin for health. With the help of DevSquad’s Tutorial of “picking up object with scoring.” (VirtusEdu, 2016) He created the binding for the value of the target score in the event graph.

To make the target score coin, the designer added a cylinder static mesh and a box collision, which will make the character gain health point. With the guidance of the DevSquad’s Tutorial of “picking up object with scoring (VirtusEdu, 2016), the designer added “cast to third person game node” to make the character get one point when touching the coin.

In this game, the character will die and have to restart game when losing all points. With Matt Aspland’s guidance of how to make “Game Over” ( Matt Aspland, 2020,) the designer added a Widget UI of “Game Over.” In the viewport of UI, the designer made a button “Retry.” Then, in the event graph, he added “On Clicked (Button)” and make it connect to “Open Level.” Then, he chose “Third Person Example Example Map” as the Level Name.

Finally, to finally make the “Game Over” UI work on the character, he duplicated the blueprint for countdown timer in the “Third Person Game Node,” changed the variables from “Timemin” to “Target Score,” and added “Create GameOver Widget.”

To make the character lose one point when touching the tin can with a robot spider, the game designer copied the blueprint of the coin to here. He added the “On Component Begin Overlap (damage character)” and connected it to the “Cast To Third

Person Game Mode.” The character set the score point to “-1” in the “Add Target Score.”

When the player loses all health points, the player will die and needs to restart the game.

After the character passes the gate, the player will see a platform, when the player controls the character to step on the platform, the platform will rise up like an elevator.

To make the elevator work, with the guidance of “UE4 Moving Platform” by Dean Ashford ((Dean Ashford, 2017,) the designer started with a squeezed cube and added two box collisions, one is “player touch, another is called end piont. Both box collisions allows the platform to move from one position to another.

To make the platform move up when the character steps on the platform, the designer added “On Begin Event Overlap (Player Touch) and made it connect with “Cast To Modified Player” in the blueprint. In the timeline, he set the first keyframe with time 0, value 0, the second keyframe as time 1, value 1.

Then, the character would jump off to the rotating platform, which is the first challenge of the game. The platform is rotating very fast, which makes the character find it is hard to catch the right time to jump to the next platform. To make the platform rotate, the game designer added “Add Action Local Rotation” in the blueprint.

The player must be quick-witted enough to catch the right time to jump. If the player delays for a few seconds, the character will jump to the air rather than the next platform. The trick to catch the right time to jump is to adjust the camera to bird view, so that the player can see where the character should stand on the platform to make jumping onto the next platform easilier.

The character kept walking until he met a tin can robot spider when he walked to the gate of the hospital building. The character needs to shoot down the robot spider to keep walking. If the character directly walked through the robot spider without shooting, the character will lose one health point.

To shoot down the robot, the player needs to aim the gun to the top of the tin can. Then, pressing the left mouse button several times, which makes the robot spider fall down. When it falls down, the character can keep moving.

As the character walks, the player will see two rooms at the top of the inside building. When the character is walking to the end of the road, the player will see two motorcycles, which will ride the character to different rooms.

To make the motorcycle function, the game designer imported the motorcycle fbx from his assessment in the module “Advanced Modelling and Animation.” He used the same blueprint of the elevator platform, but he changed the positions of two box collisions to make the motorcycle move from a particular start point and end at a different end point

The player needs to guess which room can lead the character to find the captain Katya, if they went to a wrong room, they will be stuck in the room.

After restarting the game, the character changed to another way to go to another room. To reach to another room. The character has to ride on one motorcycle to a rotating platform, and then take another motorcycle to the room.

In the room, the character needs to walk through a gate, but it is easy to be harmed if directly walking through it, because there is a tin can robot spider hung at the

top of the gate. To pass it without losing health points, the player should press “C” to crouch to pass.

After passing the gate, the player will see a new motorcycle, which will ride the character to a new house.

In the new house, the player finds the captain Katya, she is riding on the motorcycle and obstacles by a tin can robot spider.

To make the captain Katya blueprint, the designer imported the captain and AK-49 rifle fbx models from his assessment of module “Advanced Modelling and Animation” as well as the motorcycle and a platform in the viewport. The designer used the same blueprint for it as the moving platform.

To rescue the captain, the character needs to shoot down the robot spider. When the spider is shot down, the character can ride on the platform with the captain and ride to the helicopter, which means the character successfully saves the character and accomplishes the mission.

The Game level is the first rescuing game project the game designer made with the UE4 blueprint rather than coding, which allows him to spend more time on thinking about how to design impressive puzzles and challenges. When modifying the project in the future, the designer will detail the level design by adding AI for the robot spider, as well as the VFX for all characters and the game environment.

Work Cited

VirtusEdu, 2016. How To Create A Pickup Object With Scoring — #8 Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Creations Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-_-LyXhW9s [Accessed March 5, 2021].

Anon, 2020. How To Make A Game Over Screen — Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjH-i-NoYAk [Accessed March 4, 2021].

VirtusEdu, 2016. Creating A Game Match Timer — #12 Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Creations Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er0kF608iFI&t=371s [Accessed March 5, 2021].

VirtusEdu, 2016. Countdown Timer With Game Over — #13 Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Creations Tutorial. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x98nZ64NAUQ&t=82s [Accessed March 4, 2021].

Anon, 2017. UE4 — Tutorial — Moving Platforms (request). YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBywfZko0M4 [Accessed March 4, 2021].

Anon, 2017. UE4 — Tutorial — Moving Platforms (request). YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBywfZko0M4 [Accessed March 4, 2021].

Titus, 2016. Free picture: rock, wall. PIXNIO. Available at: https://pixnio.com/textures-and-patterns/rock-stone-texture/rock-wall [Accessed March 8, 2021].