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Conjury Revell
Project Overview

Engine: Unreal 4

Team Size: 30 (14 Level Designers)

Development Time: 5 Months

Conjury Revell is a single-player First Person Shooter set in a gothic steampunk city where players use spells and the environment to fight against the forces of an oppressive regime.

Roles and Responsibilities

Level Design and QA

  • As a level designer, I worked primarily with other level designers as well as programmers and artists to design, build, decorate, and play test the third and final level.

Narrative Design

  • Though it got cut due to time constraints, I did work as a narrative designer / writer on the project. I worked with the Game Designer and another narrative designer and a programmer to write and implement dialogue in the game.

Specific Elements Worked On

Level 3: Airships

  • Initially, the 3rd and final level was about 5 times the size of what it ended up as. We had at least 15 ships the player would battle through, but we had no clear goal other than "defeat all the enemies".

  • We wound up cutting most of the level out, focusing in on only 3 larger ships, and implemented the ship movement mechanic we'd been planning on. Doing this allowed us to iterate faster and polish earlier, something that would have been all but impossible before the cut.

  • I focused on creating loops on the ship decks, through and around the shipping containers, allowing for verticality in the gameplay space and leaning in to the game's use of constant motion and speed.

  • Once the gameplay was set and the levels were largely decorated, I helped the programmers on the strike team find and fix bugs within our autosave and respawn systems, as well as refining the use of the ship movement mechanics, ensuring a smoother experience for the player.

Cut Narrative Elements

  • Before the narrative elements (story beat cards between levels as loading screens as well as dialogue between the player character and an npc) were cut, I worked closely with the Game Designer and Lead Level Designer on crafting a story and script for the game.

  • The initial story board didn't mesh well with the tone of gameplay we were creating, so we pivoted to make the story match what we envisioned our game becoming - the main character became a little more jaded and egotistical as opposed to a brighter, more hopeful youth.

  • The project was falling behind schedule, and the team had to make a lot of cuts across the board in terms of gameplay, assets, and planned features in order to get the game shippable. Unfortunately, most of the narrative elements wound up on the cutting room floor. While personally disappointing, it's always best to make sure that the project has, and therefore all the people working on it have, the best chance of success.

Team Retrospective

What Went Well?

  • Established technology early

    • We were able to get the gameplay technology working well early on, which meant we were able to iterate on gameplay throughout the process.​

  • Strike teams gelled quickly​

    • Each level had teams of designers, programmers, and artists working together. We generally worked well together to achieve our goals every milestone.​

  • We made the fun​

    • We took our initial ideas and refined them to a concise, fun experience for most players. Both the team and our stakeholders found the gameplay fun and engaging.​

What Went Wrong?

Even Better If?

  • Not focusing on story first

    • We had a theme for the artists, but nothing to truly guide the design of the levels themselves. As a result, the levels were unfocused and required more revision and iteration than was ideal.​

  • Making the fun took a long time

    • We iterated at and during every milestone from Prototypes to Alpha, cutting what wasn't working along the way. We spent too much time trying to "find" fun with new mechanics or waiting for juice to make what we had better. ​​​

  • Develop a narrative early on

    • Even if it's just the bare bones of a story, having a narrative frame in place would have given every level strike team a clear goal they could design around.​

  • Focus in a key fun gameplay early​

    • If we had focused on making the gameplay fun in the earliest milestones instead of assuming that we could find something fun with new mechanics or better art, we could have delivered an even better project. Not being afraid to cut mechanics that we wanted but were too cumbersome would have made our game better.​

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