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Game Summary

Take on the role as a blacksmith roaming through an endless dungeon. The game features strategic meele combat where the objective is to slay as many enemies as possible before your life comes to an end. However the further you venture into the dungeon the stronger your enemies will become.

Game Info

Genre: Endless Dungeon Crawler

Players: Single Player

Platform: PC

Team size: 9 Members​

Project time: 5 Weeks

Engine: Tengine

Contributions

Position: Lead designer/Lead Level designer

  • Designing & documenting the inital game concept before the project start

  • Creating the layout for all the games levels

  • Adjusting the character values to create skillfull combat

  • Managing the team throughout the project

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Game Design

Game Design

I was the one creating the inital design & documentation of TLB (The Legendary Blacksmith) and this was done before the actual production of the game started.

 

In TLB the player has access to three weapons, a Scimitar, a Spear and a Warhammer. Each of these have their own strengths and weaknesses in combat.

The thing about TLB is that each weapon has durability that gets depleted after each strike and if a weapon hits a wall the attack is canceled and additional durability is lost. If all durability is lost on a weapon, it will start to regain it’s durability but it cannot be used until it’s fully repaired.

 

This results in the player not always having access to the ideal weapon for all situations and can requires the player to be on his toes and use sub-optimal strategies to pass through the dungeon.


All attacks in this game are fairly slow and cannot be canceled or redirected which leads to precision and timing being key. Trying to bait enemy attacks and then striking back when they are vulnerable.

Level Design

Level Design

As the game is endless the levels has to be endless as well and considering how short this project was I had to find a way to create quite a lot of content in a short time.

 

So what I decided on was to create a few different rooms that could be reused to create multiple layouts

Step 1

First of I created layouts for empty rooms that would serve as a base to create mutliple levels.

Each room had a starting point and an level exit. And most had multiple paths connecting these.

Step 2

Then we would blockout the level in Maya using a modular kit our artists had made.

Step 3

Then I used our in-game editor to place down props to block of paths and to create obstacles during encounters.

Here I also put out enemy type and spawn locations.

Step 4

Then an artist took over to decorate the level.

 

And then we repeated step 3-4, 4-5 times to have each room come in multiple layouts.

In the final game, we had 6 base rooms and each room had four to five different layouts of props and enemies that a room could pick from each time the player entered a new room.


This allowed us to reuse a lot of our assets for the game and still not make the levels feel incredibly repetitive. And it made it harder for players to memorize the exact layout/enemies when entering a new room.

One thing I focused on a lot when creating the layouts of the levels was how the weapons and enemies behaved. The game needed all kinds of areas to fight in. Some areas where it’s difficult to use some type of weapons and easier to use other, like a small corridor. Or open areas where the combination of enemies is the challenge rather than trying to avoid hitting a wall.

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