Throughout my third level design class in Year 3, we were asked to create a level using for an existing game using an engine or level editor of our choice. I chose Farcry 5 and its Arcade Editor. Having never used this level editor before, I needed to learn it from scratch. It was challenging at times, especially with enemy AI restraints but I believe I created something great.
My design pillars revolved around multiple routes of play and technical sections where players needed to plan out how they approach. I also knew that I wanted a final outdoor section where the player must escape to a helicopter by stealing a car and outrunning the enemies who give chase.
After getting familiar with Arcade, I spent some time creating some diagrams and maps in miro. These would be the guide for my first iteration.
I wanted to create an underground military bunker, overtaken by terrorist cult members. I found some references on the layout of some real world spaces to inform my creation.
I first created a quick playground/mock up to test some of the major features and mechanics that I intended on using.
After Testing the playground, I found that the enemy AI would alert almost every enemy in a very wide radius. This made it very difficult for players to sneak through. With this new information, I made a full graybox level based on my maps and diagram’s making sure to force enemies to look certain directions and stay in their assigned rooms. An annotated video walk-through is featured above.
Final Version
After a few round of testing and iteration I isolated some main issues and for my final level I had a few main principals to build around.
- My vents were no functioning as intended, players were able to clip out of the vent when climbing in from the ladder. A fix I found through testing was to remove all ladders and create objects for the player to climb. When climbing into a vent using a ledge grab, There is no clipping and the player does not need to manually crouch.
- Players were sometime unclear on the underground aspect of the level. To make it clearer, I added some extra room with exposed cave walls to really sell the world.
- The largest issue I faced had been holding me back for the entire time, this was the enemy AI, In the outdoor driving section, the enemies would just not chase the players and sometimes drive into the woods. I found that putting the road on a different height level made sure that the AI vehicle nav-mesh would use the roads.
I created two new cave rooms to help make the underground nature of the level clear. I also added another two rooms to make the level less linear and create more vent routes.
I then got to work creating the final level in the Editor. Using everything I learned throughout my process, I made sure the player could progress along many different paths. They could use vents and cover to remain hidden or just run in guns blazing. I also added a special optional heavy enemy which dropped a light machine gun to reward the player for taking on extra risk and challenge.
Throughout this whole process I kept an level design document which updated and changed with each new iteration.
After uploading my finished level I found that It had actually been played quite a lot by random online players. At least 478 people had played my level and the final rating was just a little over 4/5 stars.
Jack McLoughlin 