Battle Bows Level Design Example
Battle Bows is a cooperative VR Archery Tower Defense game where you protect your castle from invading balloon enemies.
For the first update of Battle Bows, I was tasked with creating a level design that would feature four main enemy doors instead of two. Crafting a complete level of Battle Bows meant the following also needed to be considered:
- Bringing interesting verticality with ramps, bridges, and ruins
- Congruity with ramp, bridge, and ruin themes from the original design
- Ensuring all external pathways ended at the two doors into the castle
- Adding towers and buildings where enemies could pause, exit from, and hide behind
- Ensuring there were interesting pathway loops to build tension and enemy pileup
- Completing outer pathway connections to each other
- Completing a Boss Pathway that circled the entire castle
- Finishing with more side pathway connections
Fleshing out the Winter Keep Level Design
The level was first set up using a series of PowerPoint images to accomplish this. This was then reviewed with the Design Director and artists to ensure the concept and the greybox level could be created from the design.
During the greybox phase, I asked the artists to scoop the level upward on all sides so the castle was sitting at the bottom of a bowl-like valley to help bring even more verticality to the level. Two artists then coordinated with me while finishing the level's visuals to completion, adding pockets of trees, craters, fencelines, skyboxes, icebergs, and more.
The final Winter Keep environment for Battle Bows
I then mapped out dozens of enemy pathways, hidden targets, and exploding barrels during the greybox phase and on into the polish phase until the final product was completed.
