Highlander The Game

Presentation

Beat’em All – PC, X360, PS3 – 2008 (Canceled)

What I did.

  • Level proposal, planning and design, construction and implementation.
  • First part of the combat system tutorial.
  • Design of two levels in the Pompei environment in pairs with an environment artist.
  • Presentation of the level to the Level Design team, documentation.

What I’ve learned

  • Level Design… 3D game version!

  • How to give the illusion of freedom to the player.

  • Communicate and exchange on our respective constraints with my environment artist.


Highlander is a 3D beat’ em up game from the famous movie franchise, developed by Widescreen Games for Eidos. The game runs on Unreal Engine 3.
Due to the financial difficulties of Eidos, it was cancelled in 2008, in a state close to completion.

I was a level designer / builder on this game, in charge of the tutorial and two full levels that took place in Pompei.
This game allowed me to go further in the process of creating levels, because being in 3D and using an environment with free navigation, I had to modify my approach for their design.
I had to carefully design the combat sequences in order to keep an interesting difficulty curve, the combat system inadvertently making it possible to raise the difficulty because not perfectly well designed.

It was also the first time that I had to work closely with a 3D artist as a partner. We had to discuss and share our respective constraints on a regular basis in order to be as effective as possible. I had to make a lot of alterations and modifications, as soon as new gameplay elements were changed. It helped me to become reactive, to adapt and to quickly find effective solutions for my levels.

Also in charge of the first part of the tutorial, I had to do a lot of scripts with Kismet, the visual scripting language of Unreal Engine 3, which was completly new to me.

I learned the level design the hard way on this project, thanks to Nicolas Pacaut, who made me think about every aspect, intention or objective I wanted to express in my levels, while remaining faithful to the vision of the game.

 

 

Screenshots

Manuel Utsunomiya Bonisoli ⓒNut Island Studio Powered by: Grav, Foundation 6 and the Bones theme