Under - Goldberg Canyon

Level Design Project for Uni

This was a level design I made for a uni assignment. The brief was to come up with a game idea and construct a rough, non-functional map of it within Unity. I came up with the idea of a horror western game called Under, which saw a sheriff investigating a notorious gang only to come under attack by nightmarish creatures bursting from deep under the earth. My original plan was to make a level set in a labyrinth of tunnels within a mine, like the tunnels in Gaptooth Breach in Red Dead Redemption. However, my low level of experience with Unity at that point in my degree made constructing tunnels like that difficult.

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Instead I made a level that took you through a spiralling canyon, with a slow build-up to a chaotic climax where monsters interrupt a shoot-out between you and some enemies in a western town, attacking you all relentlessly. The map may seem overly linear with few enemy encounters, but I was aiming to make this a very atmospheric game with big amounts of downtime between encounters. And when the encounters do happen, even one enemy can be a big threat. This was inspired by games like ZombiU. That being said, the level was a bit more linear than I was planning it to be in the canyon trails between set-pieces, which I put down to inexperience and not knowing how to make a space claustophobic while still providing enough room for agency.

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Click the button below to download my design doc for this level. The Unity files are from such an old version of Unity that they don't load properly anymore so I haven't included those.