Overview

The Fine Art of Hostage Extraction is my submission for the annual Ubisoft Toronto NEXT level design competition. My initial design was one of ten finalists selected from across Ontario to proceed to the final phase of development: blocking out the level in Unreal and delivering a polished final product. Our goal was to design a level where players would infiltrate a guarded location to rescue a friendly NPC, that could be approached using a variety of methods. 

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Using a toolkit of modular assets, my task was to translate the 2D designs I had drafted on paper and implement those in a 3D space using the Unreal Engine. I accomplished this by first constructing a rough greybox of the playable area, to get a feel for the metrics I would use going forward. Throughout this process I had friends and colleagues playtest the level, to get a sense of which elements were working and which weren't. Several revisions, large and small, were made at this phase in order to maintain my vision from the initial design doc, while also making the level enjoyable to navigate through. 

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Once the layout of the stage had been settled on, I began implementing gameplay ingredients such as enemy guards, security cameras and elevators. Several more playtest sessions were held at this phase to determine how players were approaching the level, and what could be done to accommodate a diverse range of playstyles. 

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During this phase in the competition, Ubisoft provided us with a sudden change in the design goals; a curveball. In order to simulate the sometimes unpredictable workflow of game development, we were told that our mission would now be the first level the player experiences in the game. As a result, our mission would now need to introduce and tutorialize a new gameplay feature.

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To accomplish this, I reworked an existing gameplay ingredient I had been working on and introduced it once the player has reached the VIP. At this point in the mission, the facility goes on lockdown, forcing the player into a sealed location where they must use the new gameplay feature to escape. From here, they must navigate backwards through the level, encountering more complicated variations on this gameplay feature, before finally escaping and completing the mission. 

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