Overview

Narrative/Setting: After exploring the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Alexios/Kasandra hear about a nearby port that has been taken over by Athenian guards. These guards were initially sent from Athens to protect Mytilene. However, with the Peloponnesian War and ever increasing tributes demanded by Athens, the cities revolted against against Athens and their impossible demands. Now these guards, turned oppressors, have taken over a nearby port and have forced the city to Mytilene to pay tributes with threats of violence and blocking supplies of their much needed supplies. Alexios/Kassandra can help the city by liberating the port from the Athenian oppressors.

Requirements/Constraints: This will be a medium sized level exploring the level design behind Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s bandit outposts. This is set in a Third Person POV with simple mechanics such as, running and jumping.

Platform: Windows PC

Engine: Unreal Engine

Language: Unreal Blueprints

Tools Used: Unreal Engine, SuperGrid, First-person starter content

Team Size: 1

Role: Concept, Greyboxing, Lighting, Pacing, Scripting, Prop and Texture Placement

Download Options:

Google Drive

Goals & Restrictions

My goals with this project are to:

Solidify and practice using my level design pipeline
Learn more about stealth game level design with a Third Person POV
Learn more about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey bandit outpost design
Build a level around a game that I’ve never played before

There are also restrictions on this project. These restrictions are to help me get a better scope of the project as well as to give myself a doable deadline. These restrictions are:

No combat mechanics
Jumping and running are the only mechanics that the player has available to them

Level Design Brief

Before heading off to the editor to bash some blocks together to make an level, I made a level design brief. This level design brief helps me organize and figure out what I want my level to be. Within my level design brief, I set the theme, mission objective, narrative, playtime duration, player mechanics, level beats, and metrics.

I also start to collect possible references to places I would like the level to be located at. For this project, I started looking at the world map of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I gathered both real life and in-game photos references of Skyros Island, fortresses, and villages.

I initially made a layout for Skyros Island that was built on the side of the mountain with a theme of “Temple turned to bandit outpost”.

After some feedback, I realized that the temple was very linear in how it was played. There was only two ways of entering the temple; walking through the southern entrance or climbing up to the courtyard on the left side of the temple. The space is fairly big with not much cover in between. There weren’t many options for different areas that the player could explore. One of the main ideas of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey outposts is that it heavily promoted different ways of entering and exploring the outpost.

After the feedback on the initial layout, I decided to create another layout but on Lesbos island which was more flat compared to Skyros Island’s hilly landscape. The theme here would be “Port taken over by bandits”.

With this layout, there are multiple ways of entering the outpost. There is a entrance for the left and right side of the port. Players can also enter the port from the sea. From the entrances, players can see multiple routes they can take to explore either the port, warehouse, or hillside sections. After getting more feedback, I decided on the port layout.

Blockout

Ideas and Thought Process

Heading into this project, I knew that I had to approach this level differently than how I usually do a level since I’m used to making linear levels. While I couldn’t explicitly describe the difference between linear and open world levels at the start of this project, I had some ideas that stuck out in my head from my time playing open world games. Some of the ideas that stuck out were: no route within an outpost felt bad (good flow), multiple ways of approaching an outpost, the space can accommodate both stealth and combat playstyles. After finishing this project, here are the main differences that I grasped between linear and outpost/open world level design:

Here is the level layout and its three different sections.

The objectives of this level are:

Free all prisoners
Kill all bandits
Kill bandit leader

The Bandit Leader will ONLY spawn once the player has freed all prisoners OR killed all bandits. The outpost will be liberated once ALL objectives are completed.

Starting from the entrances, players are greeted with a view that allow them to see the three different sections of the map. Like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey outposts, I wanted my level to promote exploration and have a good sense of flow. I felt that having the player be able to get to a high vantage point and plan out their route from the beginning would promote those ideas.

To also help out with exploration and mental mapping, I specifically added weenies/Points of Interests for each section of the level. If players lose track of where they are, they can look up and locate one of the points of interests. The points of interests of this level are:

Pier Section: Cargo Boat and Pulley
Warehouse Section: Warehouse Rooftop Tent and Flag
Hillside Section: Lighthouse

These points of interest also acts as vantage points that players can use to plan out routes.

One of the key points of Assassin’s Creed level design is the ease of travel on vertical spaces like rooftops and towers. In Assassin’s Creed, vertical spaces like rooftops and rooftop cables are used as vantage points and highways. In my level, most of the vertical space can be found on the warehouse section.