Hopeguard (2025)
LEVEL DESIGN
UNREAL ENGINE 5
MIRO
NOTION
Hopeguard is an adventure game with puzzles where you play a valiant knight in a quest to kill the last known dragon. But, you lose that battle, losing your arm and sword in the process. Now lost in a forgotten part of the world, you need to advance, one step at a time, finding your way and yourself in the process.
This is a work in progress as it is my final project in my baccalaureate made by a team of 24 students. The final product is to be released on Steam at the end of February.
Hopeguard is an adventure game in which you are a proud Hopeguard, one of the most respected knights, charge to find and kill the last known dragon that took possession of the Forge. But, in a twist of event, you only manage to hurt the dragon before it took arm and you fell down in a strange and forgotten part of your land. Without your arm or your sword, you need to find your place in the world and write for yourself a new definition of what is honor by advancing in the wild world.
This project is being made by a team of 24 persons as a part of my university courses, in which I am the lead level designer. As of today, I made the Forest level on a course of 5 weeks and took part in the narrative design of the game. For short, I took part in :
- Creating the Village level
- Created the onboarding plan
- Creating and tunning the design of game mechanics
- Participate in the reiteration of the game story
First version of the Village
The village is the fourth section of the prototype. In this level, players wake up in the middle of a forest, healed by a mysterious creature, after passing out of exhaustion and blood loss. They have to process what just happened to them and find a new way to advance into the world, one step at a time.
1. Design intentions
To begin to design this level, I first had to define what was supposed to happened story-wise at this moment of the game. Where the character was, what had just happened to him before and what was the goal of the level. With these informations, I defined that the themes of the level were of loss, anger and denial. This help me define the tone of the dialogues in the level.
After that, I made a list of the mechanics that the player needed to learn to help determine how many segments I wanted for the perfect pacing.
2. Flowchart
With the intentions defined, I began to make a flowchart to plan an order of the elements that were gonna be part of the level. In it, I described the scripted events, the player’s actions, the dialogues moments, the puzzles, the vistas et when they were an important environmental storytelling element. Placing these box helped me construct the pacing that I envisioned in my last step and make sure that I could fit every piece together.
3. Plan
Once the flowchart was done, I draw a first draft of the level to have a visual guide of the map to present the level to the other level designers with the flowchart. This help me visualize the space needed and the traversals moment between the puzzles.
4. Blocking
When the flowchart and the plan was approved by the lead designer and the lead level artist, I began to integrate the blockout to have a first playable version of the level. In-engine, some adjustments needed to be made to work with the camera system of the game. Finally, the level was working perfectly, with a good pacing that engaged players.
5. Reiteration process
My biggest challenge with this level was that after two rounds of testing, we decided to completely change the onboarding plan for the players. This impacted the first and last segments of the level, in which the puzzles had to be completely changed. But, with these changes, the pacing was better and the puzzles became more interesting, polishing the experience of the players.