Development Time : 3 months
My Role : Level Designer
Game Engine : Unity
Platforms : PC
Game Description
Into the Woods is a single-player roguelike action adventure whereby you must play as a novice wizard, clear rooms full of enemies, and fight your way toward the boss in order to save your master. With a day and night cycle, things get ever more dangerous in this whimsical forest during nightfall. Discover new spells, find potion recipes, and collect the ingredients to craft said potions along the way. Some rooms lock you in until all foes are defeated. Every adventure is randomly generated, no playthrough will be the same.
My Work
As one of the two level designers among twelve developers on the team, I was tasked to create dozens of rooms, all modular with possible entrance points in each cardinal direction. Some rooms had alternate versions for nighttime, and the starting room and checkpoints have a cauldron which is needed for brewing potions. Rooms were first annotated in Photoshop, then made in Unity as blockout prefabs, later finalized, for random map generation.
I had also worked on particle effects to match the four forest themes: falling leaves for the woods, petals for the flower fields, blue glowing lights for the bioluminescent forest, and spore dust for the mushroom forest. I had also created the grass floor texture in Substance Designer, implemented post-processing using Unity's URP, and balanced item rewards to match the difficulty level of a room.
Postmortem
Despite being a team of twelve with so many moving parts, it felt like we nailed our tasks and reached our goals per biweekly deadlines. I took advantage in communicating with the art team, programmers, and our game designer to try and understand what all we needed to do for all our parts to fit in nicely and cohesively. After all, it was me and our other level designer who needed to put together these assets, edit values in the inspector, and playtest our rooms to limit test hitboxes and enemy count.
