Development

I like to start my research with the game mechanics, so I gain a solid understanding of the mechanics and existing levels within the game. Especially if it a game I have not played before. For this project, that was playing the Lyra game (UE5 starter project)

Determined the Mechanics and metrics that would need to be considered with designing the level

Lyra at the time, had few weapons choices and no snipers. So with having no snipers and no plans seen of adding them, I did not spend time planning snipping sight lines or special areas.

After doing a bunch of research on the gameplay and mechanics, I start to think about the level I want to create. This is the ideation phase, where I think about the possibilities of what the level could be.

This is about establishing the constraints of the level (Narrative, environment, location, available mechanics, etc.).

This is the best time to continue research and find references. This research helps influence design decision as well come up with new ideas!

Currently, I like to start creating my layout on a whiteboard, which had a lot of flexibility in examining the layout and making changes easily. 

Once I have an interesting layout, I create a quick whitebox (Step 4) to examine the layout and get a feel for it.

After that I return to the whiteboard layout to make changes and iterate before creating a more official Paper map.

There's a reasonable expectation that not everything in the initial layouts will feel great, and that it will have to be iterated on.

This step was a bit described in the previous step.

The creation of this initial whitebox was relatively quick for the overall large size. Building something quickly for the initial Blockout is my goal. 

The overall length of the level is near 25,ooo unreal units, and consists of multiple layers (floors). It was the most challenging space to make so far with, a large scale and multiple layers.

Initial Blockout completed within in roughly 24 hours. 

Experimenting with creating the layout with the whiteboard iteration, helps me having a more concrete layout for my paper map. 

Once I got to this point, It's more about planning weapon, ammo, health placements, etc. As well as playtesting those ideas, and iterating on them. You can find me playtesting a lot on my own, even before it gets to the real playtesting. 

Playtesting with others for this was a bit limited at the time, but I was able to get an amazing dev friend to playtest with me, and I got really useful feedback from him.

That feedback ended up reshaping the area leading up to control point (Helipad), as well as other sections. 

Once I got the feedback, I was able to go back to those areas and iterate on the design for those specific parts.