Release: November 2024
​
Tenure: Jan 2024 - Dec 2024
​
Role: Level Designer
​
Platforms: PC/PS5/Switch
​
My first project at Studio Gobo was the action adventure game Lego Horizon Adventures, Studio Gobo's first full dev project in partnership with Guerrilla Games and the Lego Group. Lego Horizon Adventures sees Aloy and her friends embark on a journey across different biomes, fighting machines and thwarting Helis and his cultists plans in a loose reimagining of the Horizon Zero Dawn story.
Lego Horizon Adventures is targeted at a family friendly audience, encouraging adventure, exploration and replayability with the option to play alone or with a friend in online or split-screen co-op. What makes the game stand out amongst other Lego games is that the world is fully realised in Lego with everything being buildable at home.
Roles & Responsibilities
-
Ownership over the Jungle Biome, ensuring quality & parity through each milestone.
-
Building levels that encourage replayability with alternative routes and puzzle permutations.
-
Re-designing & building upon existing levels to fit within our new design Pillars.​​
-
Encounter design through enemy AI markup & variable ingredient spawns within the games permutation system.
​
-
Taking Designs from 2D to 3D.
​
-
Worked closely with Environment Artists to deliver a unified vision.
-
Designing family friendly environmental puzzles & encounters to encourage exploration, adventure and reward.
Chapter 3: Jungle Biome
When I joined Lego Horizon Adventures, I inherited the Chapter 3: Jungle Biome levels (Except the Tallneck levels) shepherding and redesigning existing levels and bringing up new levels to an equal quality bar, ensuring parity across the chapter through to final release.
​
Level Structure
Lego Horizon Adventures levels are designed with three key pillars in mind; Traversal, how do we get from A to B in the most interesting way possible? Exploration and Discovery, if I go searching, will I be rewarded? And finally, Combat, where am I fighting and what am I fighting? Each of these Pillars need to feed into each other to create a cohesive level but also stand on their own for better clarity and readability for a younger target audience.
​
We also had to design maps with multiple entry and exit paths paths which we dubbed "Corridors" for a greater sense of variety and increased replayability of levels throughout the story as well as optional objectives such as Community Jobs and Apex Machine Hunts that allow the player to return to each Biome.
-
Entry Corridor - Simple, traversal based routes leading into the Combat Area. Often littered with hidden chests or simple traversal puzzles.
-
Combat Area - A clearly defined combat arena that utilises ingredient and trap permutations to fight Machines.
-
Exit Corridor - Similar to the Entry Corridor, traversal based route leading to the end of the level. These are often littered with more involved traversal puzzles and traps.
Alternate Routes
The majority of levels in Lego Horizon Adventures were designed with alternative traversal routes in mind. This was to ensure maximum replay value with our spaces and provide players with a more meaningful and less repetitive experience when levels are replayed. The shared factor between these alt paths being the Combat Area, which utilises its own permutation system to differ the combat experience.
Combat Area
-
Entry Point - Entry into Combat Area, these may differ between level permutations. These are often designed as a point of no return either through use of drop downs or traversal ingredients such as ziplines.
-
​Start Grass - Each Combat Area has a patch of grass the player can use as stealth to get the first drop on any enemies in the immediate vicinity.
-
Hard Blockers - Hard blockers used for cover and line of sight blockers. Consistent across all permutations of the Combat Area.
-
Hard Traps - Some Combat Areas have traps or propagation elements built into them, unaffected by the permutation system. Examples include water that can be electrocuted, grass that can be burned, spike trap pits, etc.
-
Permutation Ingredients - The main feature of Combat Areas are the Permutation Ingredients. These came in a variety of setups to differ the Combat Area with each playthrough. Some setups were made to encourage stealth such as grass heavy permutations, others to encourage propagation with other ingredients such mixing fire pits with grass or thorns, and others were setup to provide a greater challenge to players and enemies alike such as blocking sections off with thorns or spike traps.
Treasure Spots
Often, hidden chests/ collectibles and their associated puzzles are peppered along the golden path. On occasion, these rewards are placed along more involved routes that take the player off the beaten path, usually laid out with traversal elements and traps to add a low level of risk/reward. These reward paths are designed to loop the player back around so they don't have to backtrack and are signposted using silver studs where the golden path utilises bronze studs.
Jungle Biome Levels
