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SYBER SKIMMER

Position

Project Leader
Level Designer

Development Time

Overview

In Syber Skimmer you are Syber. An Ai working for your programmer M.C. . You'll be moving throughout a neon playspace filled with places to wall run, grapple, slide, and dash to your heart's content as you blast away enemies with your loadout of weapons.  Throughout this neon playspace, you will be completing puzzles inside levels to progress.

18 Weeks - December 2021 to May 2022

Team Size

Responsibilities

6 - 1 Level Designer

Engine

Unreal Engine 4

  • Set Sprint goals each week

  • Facilitate group workflow 

  • Create levels

  • Create puzzles

  • Develop Encounters

Level Design

  • The Goal In Mind: Create different areas for players to experience, such as vertical and confined spaces.

  • How to Achieve Our Goal: Break down the level into Landmarks. These Landmarks would be distinguishable from each other and their surroundings.​
     

  • The Three Landmarks in the level are:

    • Tower 

    • Train Station 

    • M Pyramid

  • Implementation: 

    • The Tower Landmark is the tallest vertical structure in the level nearly touching the height of the playable space with large bright orange-yellow lights that players can grapple hook onto. ​

    • The Train Station Landmark is low to the ground confined, horizontal and houses floating trains on its tracks.

    • The M Pyramid is a massive pyramid with a huge M in front of it, near its base is a door for the player to enter. 

The Tower Landmark

The Train Station Landmark

Boss Room

  • The Boss Level: 
     

    • The Boss Room I am especially proud of considering the time we had to create the level and its mechanics. "The Malfunction" is an enemy that was created by taking one of the turret enemies, scaling them up, and giving them some mechanics, and a beefy new health bar. Though to go along with this new big bad guy a new playspace was needed.
       

    • I created this environment with the player's increased movement in mind as well as the Boss's abilities. The area in this arena is quite open though including four main safe zones, outlined in red boxes above.
       

    • These four main safe zones house many different pick-ups ranging from ammo pick-ups to health pick up. The player has a few options to tackle this Boss fight, they have the ability to hunker down and play around one corner picking up pickups or at a higher level of engagement, they can use their mobility to maneuver around the arena grabbing pick-ups. The player can chain pick-ups by rotating between the four safe zones having high ammo counts and dodging many of The Malfunction's attacks.
      ​

    • How do you defeat The Malfunction?

      • The Malfunction has 2 health gates, meaning the player can damage the boss until 66% of its health, that's when an immune shield pops up and an exposed blue crystal appears on the left and right sides of the boss's platform. Once a player destroys the crystal, the immune shield drops and the player is once again able to damage The Malfunction. Throughout the design process, this was my favorite part of creating Syber Skimmer, making the mechanics to the level and the arena. ​

Combat & Encounter Design

  • The Goal In Mind: Have a unique set of weapons for players to choose from.

  • How to Achieve Our Goal: Create unique weapons for a 3 slot weapon system. Weapons could only fit in select slots, a Primary, Secondary, and Heavy weapon.

  • Implementation:

    • Shown below are three of my personal favorite weapons.

      • The Bigger Iron ​

      • The Second Chance 

      • The D.D.O.S​

  • Working closely with our Combat Designer I was able to help channel our creative visions into unique weaponry for the player to pick and use throughout playing our game. We Knew we wanted loadouts for our game, ways for the player to express themselves and their playstyles through our weapons. To achieve this we designed a system that gave the player three options, one Primary, Secondary, and Heavy weapon. ​​​​​​

  • Incremental Weapons Playtests:

    • During the design process of our weapons, we had incremental playtests. The feedback given let us gauge how players were interacting with the systems we implemented, such as ammo consumption, damage of the weapons, and how weapons interacted with enemies leading us to create critical hit spots on our enemies to reward player aim.​

    • There were plans towards the end of development to create a pistol-sword hybrid that would've taught shooting mechanics alongside melee mechanics. Seeing how fun some toys we created were led us to try and implement melee-based weapons but we did not have the time do put them into the game.

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