Home: The Game

Home is a DBGA project made for a collaboration with the non-profit organization Videogames Without Borders.

Contributions

• Level and world design
• Lighting
• Concept and first draft of the story
• Additional Scripting

Team size: 11                          Development: 6 months                        Engine: Unity

The game tells the story of a mother and a child living the transformation of their village: from a lovely little town to a place they’re afraid to live in.
The goal of this project was to give the players a glimpse of what brings people to flee from their country, and to make them experience the dread of seeing your whole life falling to pieces.

Responsibilities

The game revolves around a small town that is fully explorable, as de facto lead level designer my job responsibilities included:

• Designing the main layout of the town
  • I had to make it easily divisible into smaller stages
  • I had to build it in a way that made it possible for multiple people to work on it at the same time
  • I had to create a believable space in white-box to create a reference for the artists
  • The main story needed to unfold through the gradual exploration of the town
• Coordinating with the art team for the “before” and “after” stages
  • help managing the production of assets to suit the needs of both departments
• Designing the system that allowed multiple people to work on a single scene through prefabs
  • People needed to work on different parts of the town at the same time
  • People needed to work on different versions of the town at the same time (before and after)
  • Artists needed to update the assets without interrupting the work of level designers

My other responsibilities included

• Level design
  • Designing early levels involving stealth gameplay as template for other designers
  • Designing various stealth segments throughout the game
  • Full ownership of the Last Stage that preceded the big climax at the end
• Lighting
  • Designing the lighting for all the stages in the game to enhance gameplay and atmosphere
  • Fixing and maintaining the lighting systems from a technical viewpoint
  • Lighting work, technical or not, still had to follow the restrictions from multiple people working on the same scene

Level Design

Second Stage: stealth section

 

At the start the player can clearly see the first “cop” looking for him and the entrance to the an area surrounded by hedges, this central area is purposely made completely safe, so that the player can rescue the kids and go back to safety easily, since this is the first time the stealth mechanic appears in the game.

For the first kid the player can easily walk past the guard when he turns the corner. The second kid is a bit trickier, the player has to go behind cover because this character is slow in stealth (the mother is faster). The last guard walks in a circle around a hedge so either the player times it right coming from the path or he can take the safe route through the center.

The Last Stage

This stage comes after the mother and the kid fled their home and are forced to go separate ways. This is also the last level before the big final set piece so it needed to be the tipping point for our gameplay. At this point the player realizes that the bad guys won and took the town, so to show it we made the mother witness the chaos caused by the rebels while she has to go through this area full of enemies.

For the pacing of the stage I wanted to start with an open area where the player can easily see the path to the end and also all the guards he must walk past. This section also needed to establish a feeling of danger so, the player is directed on a path that, while safe, puts him very close to the guards, keeping him on his toes.
The next section was added to the town design for last, because I felt that, for the pacing of the level, we needed a beat of tension that the former area wasn’t quite suited for.
The area is guarded by enemies that aren’t on patrol but shoot at first sight, causing instant game over, so the player has to keep an eye on the enemies all the time and move very carefully from cover to cover.
The last section uses the same trick as before, the enemies are pretty close but it’s hard for them to see the player. The path this time is very straight forward allowing the player to take a breather before the climax of the story.

Lighting

Lighting Design

Part of my level design responsibilities was to design the lighting for every level in the game, especially for the “after “levels, that take place at night.
The lighting in our game served two main purposes: the first was to create the atmosphere and set the tone for each level, the second was to ease the navigation for the player and guide him to his destination. To achieve these goals I decided to adopt some kind of language for our lights.