The Unreal level I made to work on Bioshock Infinite
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- Опубліковано 1 чер 2024
- Patreon: / stevelee_gamedev
Discord server: / discord
Twitter: / essell2
00:00 - Intro
01:41 - Showing as many vertical situations as I can
05:30 - How I faked the skylines
10:13 - Final set-piece - two buildings shot out of the sky
13:47 - Not a normal amount of work!
15:24 - Selling the idea of a city in the sky
17:33 - Final takeaways
#leveldesign #unreal #bioshock #gamedev - Ігри
While I’m not a level designer, I am a big nerd for immersive sims. Thank you for taking the time and energy to share your thoughts, can’t wait for more!
You're welcome, glad you liked the video :)
Really like how you combined so many elements to make it play just like a Bioshock Infinite level but with totally different tools and assets. Very enlightening to see.
Cheers Nick, good to hear :)
Very interesting how you faked the functionality of the skylines! I used a similiar technique for showing of wallrunning and climbing by using splines in UE 5, where the player basically just enter a trigger and you will follow the spline's path. Not so much gameplay, but I thought it sold the idea well :)
Sounds cool :)
I moved from doing level design for more than 5 years to software engineering, btw I do still love watching your videos :D
Haha, good! :)
If you've seen my video about the level design test I did to work on Dishonored 2, you'll see how different these tests were, and consequently, how different my approach was to them: ua-cam.com/video/8cEccZCPamA/v-deo.html
Every studio, project and level design test is different. As I mention, the way I approached this was super unique to the brief, the studio, the lack of a time limit (which is unusual and bit problematic, in hindsight), and the tools I had at hand to make something with.
I hope it’s interesting though - let me know what you think!
This has been very helpful, as I am currently applying for level design positions. I have a Masters in design from University, but only QA in mobile games and making + releasing my own indie game for experience, so to see what I can do to improve from your videos has been really helpful, thank you!
This video is great. If you haven't already made a video on a level you made from Bioshock Infinite, it would be interesting to see you now play through a level you made for that game and maybe even explain how it compared to this, and how you adapted your future level designs to better fit the gameplay of BioShock Infinite. Hearing your thoughts on how you made it more grounded and fit the gameplay of bioshock infinite would be interesting too. I am currently making levels for a game project and I always find it challenging to perfectly match the level design with the gameplay, or in your case to make things more grounded but not too grounded. I have difficulty in finding the correct balance for these things
Yeah it can be hard, and there are no fixed rules for these kinds of questions.
In the end the LD process on Infinite was quite challenging, so I have mixed feelings about some aspects of my levels turned out, haha. Tricky to talk about in a public video, but maybe someday I'll find a way 🤔
Crazy level of quality here for a test - glad you pointed out the scope stuff too. Would love to touch base soon!
I noticed the flowers on my first viewing, but never understood how the rails worked. God this is an incredible test!
Amazing video would love more like this. Super cool to get this behind-the-scenes process on your demo level.
Great to hear Ben, glad you liked it :)
I'd be curious to hear more about the approach between an abstract environment vs a more realistic one. That annotation where you mentioned Ken Levine asking about that really caught my eye!
Sometimes I forget how useful using pre-existing game development kits and modding tools like this can be a really effective method of designing levels.
I actually took a similar approach to your skyline on a personal project.
Wanted the player to be able to walk on tightropes. Theres an invisible pawn on the tightrope that tries to get as close to you as possible. If you touch it you posses the invisible pawn
I loved Infinite! Thanks for being apart of and helping create such a great experience
Lovely to hear, thanks / you're welcome :)
We really appreciate that you share your thoughts and experience, it's incredibly informative! ) ...
Great to hear, cheers :)
I've always been interested in level design. I use to make loads of levels for fun in time splitters, and FarCry 2 Map editors. Temptation has been ruling me for a long time, other than taking the leap into trying. Your discussion on experience is of massive importance to me. Tone..
Thankyou for sharing. Very much enjoy how humble you are about everything.
That's lovely to hear, thanks :)
Love this video! Shows the reasoning for adding more detail to blockouts/demonstrations to illustrate intentions. Proof of concept is invaluable, and often overlooked in level design- leaving it to the artists is poor form.
Thanks for this Steve. Genuinely really interesting!
Great to hear, cheers :)
It's amazing! Especially the idea of using an invisible platform to demonstrate the skyline in the middle of the video caught my eye. The position I want to go to requires UE5 to make demos, and UE5 doesn't have robust gameplay. This video is great! This kind of video showing the idea of level making is very helpful for newcomers like me! Thank you so much!
Great to hear, thanks :)
Great Video and level demo! Lots of great beats and a very cool finish. The leaning buildings and sliding crates were excellent touches to really immerse the player into the experience.
Yeah I'm still happy with it, looking back now. Thanks :)
Thank you Steve for sharing!
Very interesting and insightful!
I love this approach of "faking" systems/tech with what you currently have (matinee/sequencer/etc.) way before it's produced. And agree with you than it's one of the fundamental skills a level designer should develop. In a nutshell a level designer is a designer of a player's experience. ;)
Hehe, good to hear it helps! I consider myself a visual person in many ways, but ultimately when you're designing things that people play, the process and thinking has to be led by how it would feel to play 👍
This is so freakin' cool! Great video Steve!🖤
Cheers! :)
More level design to the god of level design
This is insanely cool. Thank you for this breakdown, very inspiring and gives a good understanding of the goals a level designer should set for themselves making portfolio levels/tests.
The amount of work could be smaller for sure, but it's good that you cared so much to put in extra :)
Cheers Irina - great to hear it's inspiring (and that I got my message across about it being a bit too much work, haha) 👍
@@stevelee_gamedev Btw, do you think the same camera and movement effects could have been achieved without Matinee? For example, probably speeding up the character on a trigger should help with showing the skylines idea, but other than that, it feels like there's a lot of animations around there
Thanks for this video and your work on Bioshock ❤
Thanks / you're welcome :)
Thanks for these insights 🙏 I learn a lot from your videos, really motivating
Great to hear, cheers :)
Thanks for sharing and breaking it all down! Super insightful
Good to hear, you're welcome :)
Wow it’s really impressive what you achieved here! There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors but the feeling it conveys is definitely as if you were working with the actual development kit of Bioshock 👏
Cheers :) Yeah smoke and mirrors aplenty here, haha. Now and then there's a right time for it...
Awesome video. Very clever with the platforms. :)
Cheers :)
Thanks!
I've got to tell my mom about this channel. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge!
Haha you're welcome (tell your mum I've got a Patreon too!)
@@stevelee_gamedevI believe she will happily do her part 🤟
Well played mum
Fantastic video as always, Steve. I'm curious how long it took to make this playable build considering it's size. If you're allowed to share with us, can I ask if there was anything else that you were required to submit as part of the test? Any documentation like a layout or an outline of you design process? Cheers again for sharing your insights with us :)
Yeah there was a choice of a couple of written questions to provide answers to, alongside the practical test. Again, I ended up writing a little more for these than I probably needed to, haha. Lessons learned and all that.
Overall I think I spent about 3 weeks working on the test, mostly in evenings, and I think maybe I took a few cheeky days off work as well. Don't quote me on this though, it was a long time ago and I can't remember exactly :P
The style of architecture reminds me of the first BS Infinite prototype with Art nouveau style.
This is fantastic, I love the faked functionality and how well it demonstrates the intent!
Your heavy use of sampling and inspiration from the trailers also echoes an interesting point I heard in Digital Foundry's latest podcast episode. In that one of the possible challenges Redfall faced could have been their secrecy around the project making it difficult to find talent interested in working on it. We may roll our eyes at excessively early cinematic trailers nowadays, e.g. Cyberpunk, but they can actually serve to drive interest among potential employees and, as is evident in this case, allow them to enhance their interviews by developing related skillsets and ideas.
Yeah totally - projects like Alien Isolation made sure to tease the fact that they were working on it (a very different kind of project for Creative Assembly at the time), to help establish the new team for it
Inspiring as always! Thanks for sharing. I wonder though what would be your editor choice if you received this brief in 2023...
Yeah I think about that kind of thing sometimes - I think it might still be Unreal Engine (but UE4 / 5), for basically the same reasons as back then. Just like if I did the Arkane level design test again, I think I'd also go for a Half Life 2 level again, haha. Not much has changed in the world of LD tools, unfortunately!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts behind the level. It's so valuable. Glad that you said we don't have to make such an excellent level for a design test lol. Also, could you share some insights about implementing enemy AI into the level? cuz enemies behave very naturally in your level just like in a finished game, did you script them all by hand or we can use some templates in asset store or something?
I think I applied some amount of basic scripting to some of the enemies in this level, but it really did just boil down to either "run here when the player touches this trigger", or maybe "fire at them now", etc. And all the skyline stuff is the same as I did for the player - invisible platforms animated to pick up the NPCs and carry them around the level, along the path of the skylines :)
The irony of this test is that level designers were rarely allowed to build spaces- "level architects" (level artists empowered with combat metrics knowledge and mandates to build combat spaces) built most combat spaces in BioShock Infinite.
Wow, what did LD's do mostly then? Planning and scripting?
@@Merevarine Mostly, yes. I was employed for many months there doing nothing but combat scripting with AI.
@@LDLearning Sad. But hopefully, you had fun with it anyway. The game turned out to be awesome! And yeah, it seemed like the most prioritized parts were narrative and art.
Thanks for the great insight as always! A couple questions. Did you need to send them the level for them to play, or just a video of you playing it? And on that note, same with your HL2 level, how do you assess the difficulty of the level?
I only needed to send them a video of the level, which played a huge part in my approach to the test. The arkane level design test on the other hand, needed to be a playable level, so I approached it really differently.
Re: in this case, I didn't really worry about difficulty, so long as it looked exciting and I was able to finish it. (I might have even recorded the video with God mode on, to be honest - I can't remember). Whereas with my Arkane test, I wanted to to be challenging enough to pose real gameplay to think about, while also trying to be easy and forgiving enough that people at Arkane wouldn't actually die when they test it, haha. Lots of health packs and ammo, etc.
Hope this helps!
@@stevelee_gamedev Yep, that makes sense. Thanks for the reply!
Thanks for sharing this, good stuff! Did you send Irrational just the video or did you also send them the build or any documentation?
I didn't send a build, only the video, and there were some questions to provide written responses to, too
@@stevelee_gamedev I see. I recently did a level design test task for a company and they asked me to make a blockout level that met some criteria using any editor and they wanted me to provide them with a build, level design documentation and reference materials for artists. Any chance you could make a video about the way you prepare such documentation?
great work Dude, keep it up :)
Cheers, will try :)
8:50 uh, why do these blocks have wheels? xD
But yeah, this is extremely impressive. Left me constantly wonder if sounds were added in-engine or in post after recording.
Do you know if the hiring team actually played your level or only watched the video?
Haha, you're not the first to comment on those. When I made them I imagined them as wooden carriages, strewn across the street in some kind of chaotic crash / riot - functionally I just wanted some kind of barrier that justified why the player jumps onto another skyline to progress. But in the end I was working so quickly that I just left them as big boxes with cute wheels on :)
How did you make your ai in this? It look surprisingly decent for a level showcase, was there a certain tutorial you followed or something? If you can't tell, I'm trying to make similar AI for my game but I have no idea how lol
I used the AI bots that came as part of the UDK - that version of Unreal was based on Unreal Tournament 3, and it had these bots you could spawn, that would shoot at the player when they see them. As far as I can remember the only other thing you could do with them script wise, was script them to move to a particular position, which I use a bunch of times in the video too. But being focused on level design, I didn't make them myself :)
@@stevelee_gamedev That makes sense, thanks for the response and great video btw!
@@dobrx6199 You're welcome, and cheers :)
Love this! How did you determine where the player is going to go in the start of the level? How do I guide players to go where I want?
In the specific case of this test, because I knew I just had to submit a cool gameplay video (and not send over something they could play themselves, with things going wrong etc), I didn't really worry about guiding players where I wanted to (other than naturally trying to avoid anything that looks obviously weird or contrived).
I think I mostly just designed the flow of the level in terms of the kind of verticality and situations I wanted to show. So the start of the level is things like "player sees Songbird, trigger VO line about looking for Elizabeth. Drop down onto skyline. See loads of fighting while on the skyline. See rocket hit the skyline ahead and dramatically drop down onto another one", etc. Just focusing on showing exciting things in a dramatically logical order :)
Absolutely exceptional. The concept of “what if” scenarios around the core theme is enlightening.
Great video! Would you mind telling us what parts/levels of Bioshock Infinite you worked on?
I worked on the Town Center section near the start of the game. It was divided into 3 sections, and I worked on parts 2 and 3 👍
My question is, did you animate all the animated assests? the trains, the buildings falling. Aside, did you had to script a lot of things?
Yeah like I mention in the video, I used UE3’s matinee system to animate everything myself. That and yeah, most of what you see in the video is scripted (but I didn’t make any of the AI robots I’m shooting - they came with UDK at the time, with the basic scripting ability to tell them to move somewhere and shoot at the player)
Hey Steve Lee, would you mind doing an in-depth level designing video on Left 4 Dead 2’s Survival game mode by any chance?
Hi, I've never actually made a L4D level, so that would take me a lot of time to learn it well enough to make an in-depth video about it, unfortunately. I'd like to try it someday, but have no idea when I'll find the time. Your interest is noted, though :)
Are you often expected to have atleast some simple AI enemies, an FPS controller etc. on hand to Make a PLAYABLE level? Or would you be supplied with a project to work in with some of actual mechanics?
i have never played bioshock before...So in your video,the player was following the rail by just the animation control?
In my scripted gameplay video, yep - the player is just standing on an invisible platform that I've animated to make the look like they're using the skyline (including various scripted sounds and events, etc) 👍
Funny how, in all your videos, you always say that you did "too much work" for a level design test;
But in the end you did get the jobs.
Maybe it wasn't too much, you just have to be exceptional to get a level design job. Or at least, it always pays off.
Yeah, it's complicated. I will say that when I look at student level design portfolios, I often feel like there's a lack of substance and focus to their work, that comes from their time being spread so thinly across so many different types of projects. It often feels like their portfolio doesn't represent the best of what they can do, which is the whole point. So while working hard is important, I think it's equally important that students move away from being "generalists", and focus more on raising the quality of more specifically chosen projects as high as they can.