Narrative Designer

Level Designer

Waves of Decay
Unreal Engine 4

A personal passion project based on one of my favourite games Dead by Daylight. Followed the Level Design pipeline from start to finish to create a fully gray-boxed level with fleshed out documentation outlining a full potential chapter to be used within the game.

View LDD

Process Work

Research

In-game exploration and experience and looking at most liked maps, what players liked about them and loop path requests.

Dug into several killer lore's that have not yet been added to the game both fiction and non-fictional killers to find one that would be suitable for Dead by Daylight.

Design

After several redesigns of the base map for Waves of Decay settled on the current design.

Highest optimal looping paths, plenty of opportunities for chasing, evading and gen pressure. Accounting for the various types of killers and their ranging powers I worked to ensure the map would be balanced no matter the matchup.

Gray box Prototype

Accounted for the random tile spawns of all gens, hex totems, hooks, chests, gates and lockers which gives a breakdown visually for spacing in the gray-box.

A challenge was re-working some areas that worked on paper but not in 3D, for example a couple window placements needed to be adjusted in the gray-box to ensure players couldn't jump out on top of someone else climbing out a lower window.

Documentation

Building the LDD started prior to the gray-boxing stage when I was still fleshing out the backgrounds, ethnicity and design for the characters in the chapter.

As the level grew so did the LDD with details ranging from landmarks, important features to the level, blueprints, lore and other necessary components to realize this chapter.

Even went as far as creating my own background designs for the LDD.

Blueprints

Constructing a blueprint allows for an easy transition between paper prototype to 3D gray-boxing prototype.

In Waves of Decay, it was essential to create a blueprint for every floor - Ground floor, Upper floor and Basement. This allowed a top down view for plotting where core components such as hooks, generators, chests and hex totems would spawn on the map.

Rather than planning for the base amount of core components I felt it was more beneficial to accommodate all possible spawn locations to allow easy map variation planning.

Proposed Unique Items

Suitcases, fishing gear and nets litter the grounds of Gilgo Beach.
Within the killer shack a table strewn with vials of poison, knives, night vision goggles, a police scanner and harpoon bullets, disassembled traps lay discarded on the ground around the table.
A map adorns the wall, red string tying burial places of each victim together like a chain of people.
Along the shore half dug-up graves, some with bodies partially pulled out lie waiting to be discovered.