Over My Dead Body
Level Design
The basic premise of Over My Dead Body is to escape a dungeon using your own dead body to get passed obstacles. The challenge was coming up with creative ways to both kill the player and use the bodies to beat the same trap.
Built in Unreal Engine 4.
Process…
Team Project | Unreal Engine 4 | Google Docs
Step 1 | Conceptualisation
Firstly come up with the general concept; in this case using dead bodies to solve puzzles. With that in mind start designing various interactions which a limp body could interact with. For example, A Pressure Plate, Spinning Gears that can be jammed or a platform to jump from. Flesh out these traps and interactions in a Design Document, decide what could be done in the short time frame and hand off to the programmers.
Step 2 | Blockout
Premade assets from the Unreal Store were used and due to the game jam setting I skipped the basic sketch stage. Start filling out the level to get an idea of flow from start to finish adding in trap placements as required. I was aiming for several rooms requiring a different solution before reaching the end door.
Step 3 | Iteration
Playtest and iterate accordingly. One major problem was a particularly long spike jump which required multiple bodies in a row acting as platforms; this was after getting past another trap which required a dead body. After dying the player respawned before the first trap and it was really frustrating and badly designed - therefore the spike jump was reduced to only require one body. In hindsight I would place a spawn point between these two sections to properly break it up.
Step 4 | Polish
Fill up the level with extra details to bring it to life. The level is linear therefore adding small secret areas for the player to explore such as a collectable, a mimic chest and a “Kick the Bucket“ interaction created a little more interest. General lighting was added to highlight certain sections - secret areas were given a green glow whereas the level in general had warm tones.
Step 5 | Tutorial
Work on the narrative and write the dialogue which would act as the tutorial text as well as generally help bring the character to life.
Over My Dead Body - Design Deck
