For this week of development, I was assigned and tasked with creating some rough drafts of the chamber blockouts. Coming into this task, the team had not yet grasped what the design of our game was meant to be.  We had only focused on the technical design of the game itself but not necessarily the visual design of what everything would look like on the screen. This caused some limitations in terms of the ideas of objects I could represent with the blockouts, but it did allow me to focus more on other concepts of level design that would heavily affect the experience of both the player and the game itself moving forward. These concepts being the concept of scale relative to the player, the concept of how everything would move around within a level. 

When creating the first level blockout for the game, I tried to keep these two concepts in the back of my head. How big would we want each chamber to be? How much moving around do we want the player to truly have to do? How much space realistically would the enemies and the heroes want to move around in a fun and engaging way? The answers I came to when thinking about these questions were determined based on what we technically had already designed for the game.  For example, many of the enemies that the player would have to encounter boil down to simply chasing you and attacking you. In my head, I think space. The player needs space to work with to do things like run away and heal, or simply kite the enemies in a fun and engaging way. I thought about the idea of tight corridors the player could feed the enemies through, but at the end of the day, I decided against the idea of adding too much of those for now since A: the combat is autonomous, so to me it does not seem fun for the player to simply sit there as enemies are funneled in not doing anything, and B: with the smaller scale of the levels, it seemed to me that it would be easier for the player to find themselves stuck in corners when they otherwise should have more autonomy. Because of the lack of tight corridors, I did however want to add different sets of buildings or objects the players can loop around or kite around. This would also act as different objects enemies can appear from behind. I thought of this because A: looping is fun (I am a fan of COD zombies) and B: it would allow players more ways to outplay swarms and ranged types with their own ranged units if they happen to be the last ones alive in the squad (or last alive melee heroes to break line of sight from ranged enemies). The last thing was a unanimous decision from the team themselves. We want medium-sized levels similar to Hades so I gave them a medium-sized level in my head. 

So I got to work, these are some examples of some rough drawings I made of what a level blockout might look like in our game...

In this drawing, I thought an open area could be represented by the outside of a monastery or a temple. The player would spawn on the left and work their way forward slowly encountering waves of enemies that they could kite around the pillars. The player would have plenty of space to walk throughout the area, and the level exit would be found by simply entering the temple.

In this drawing, I thought about what an inside area might look like. I also thought about if we had different enemy types, where would it be fun for them to spawn? The idea is that there is a large open area separated by two rooms, debris that the player can kite and encounter enemies around, and platforms that the player could encounter ranged enemies that would shoot at them from high ground. The level exit would be a staircase in the back of the room heading into the lower dungeons.

With these two drawings in mind, I finally decided to make a more clear version of the second drawing in the first demo of the game. 

In this final level blockout, I finally set myself on a vision of what I want the levels to look like in terms of the concepts stated above. As you can see, there are clear places the player can kite around and into for safety. There is an open enough area for the player to move around, and overall the scale of the objects and level is the perfect size to work off of for levels that are made in the future. With this vision, I believe I can be creative enough to create unique and fun levels for this game.

Please keep in mind that these are not final and subject to change.