'Ashen Village' is the name me and my groupmembers gave for a multiplayer shooter level I helped design as part of a university project, having taken charge over the upper 'no-mans-land' section of the arena.
The purpose of 'Ashen Village' was to test and demonstrate the collaborative level design abilities of me and three other members:
Chris Knowles, Dylan Smalling, and Alan Villalobos
while createing a fun local multiplayer demo in the process.
We were each tasked createing one of four different parts of the same cohesive level: team 'bases' A and B, as well as a no-mans-land area between them consisting of an upper section and a lower section, done collaboratively through a git repository and organized via Unreal's sublevel system to avoid merge conflicts.
What we came up with was the concept of an unburied village, a historical site in where fighting is taking place over an uncovered treasure, or perhaps evidence of a history that was hidden by the foreces that be.
Once the game's idea and setting was set in stone, planning and pre-production involved next sketching out each of our designs of our sections, as well as making sure they each fit into each other in a way that makes sense cohesively with a final overview of the combined sections.
Once completed, we used it as well as our reference images to create a blockout that follows our intended beats as planned. From there, we created a more detailed and mechanically complete whitebox with an audio pass.
This project has overall made me even more confident in my ability to work collaboratively on a game project. It also introduced me to, and got me used to working with Unreal Engine's sublevel system, which really made version control a lot easier than it would otherwise with multiple people working on the same level.
If you are curious about the project and would like to try it out for yourself:
Click here for the Git!