Don’t Tell, Show – Unreal Engine 4 Full Level

Role : Game designer, Level designer

Introduction

Dont Tell, Show ! was made during a 3-week level design workshop in 2017. I did the level design, building and code.

It was my first creation of a whole level design.

 

Game Design

The instructions were to combine several listed gameplays (shooting, puzzles, platforms, stealth) I chose puzzles and platforms. The main idea was that the basic character of Unreal was trapped into the engine and the player had to help him escape. The engine materialized as written indications to mislead the player who must trust « instinct » materialized as lights and sounds to escape.

 

Level Design

Walkthrough

 

Inspiration

To have a memorable and interesting environment for the level, I chose to get inspiration from the Tianzi Mountains in China.

 

First Zone

The first zone is a 6-floor tower in which the player has to go up to escape.

Pink elements are the ones activated or deactivated by resolving the puzzles.

At first an arrow indicates to go down, if the players follows it, they arrive in another room saying to « go the way down« , if so, they fall down and go back to the beginning.

At the first floor , the player can activate 4 lasers towards a crystal. Aside two of them is written ON and aside the other two OFF but when the player activates them, they all make the pleasant sound and the middle platform activates when the four are activated. Therefore the player knows they should follow the sound.

At the second floor, the player has the same lasers switches, this time with colors and a letter R(ed) or B(lue) written aside. This time, the player can follow the sound or the middle pole’s colors to know what color it should be.

At the third floor, the crystal that should be touched by the laser in on the ground, therefore the player has to use their body to make the laser switches fall on the ground. The player has then to break the door to the second zone with the same technique.

 

Second Zone

First, the player is facing a series of platforms which writes « continue« , when jumping on it, the first two make the pleasant sound but the last one makes the unpleasant sound as a warning not to go further. Indeed the fourth platform has no collider and will make the player fall. As a consequence, the player has to look around and find illuminated floating leaves that are the next platforms, they do the pleasant sound as a confirmation.

Arriving in the next « island », the player has to listen carefully again : the unpleasant sound is played at the end of the corridor so they have to go back and hear a music played from behind a wall, the wall is fake and the player can go though it to arrive at the end of the level.

 

Climax

The climax of the level is the very end when the player goes back to the beginning.

 

Difficulty

The main challenge here is about perception and drawing the right conclusion out of it. Therefore the level is made to make the player learn how to interpret sounds and lights to understand the level.