Meteor Museum
Level Design Jam project created in Hammer++ with sci-fi survival horror themes.
Project Intro
This project was completed as part of Steve Lee’s Level Design Jam #8, with the themes being Evolve and A Special Place.
It was my first time actively taking part in a level design community project and I really enjoyed it, feeling part of something with a group of like-minded people, learning from one another, and seeing how the various projects progressed was really interesting.
The final level ended up being a sci-fi survival experience in the spirit of games like Resident Evil and Prey. The level events take place when a colleagues accident leads to catastrophic consequences.
The level takes place in a Natural History Museum crossed with a make-shift laboratory which was a lot of fun to create, and to make the level playable I learnt how to use Hammer Editor during the jam's duration.
Project Goals
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​Put into practice what I had learnt from my previous projects with the added pressure of time constraints.
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Get involved in the dev community and give a design jam a go.
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Create something in Hammer editor which I had next to no experience with before the jam began. This was risky but I felt the pressure of the jam would focus me and it did, my only regret was not learning Hammer sooner!
Presentation Outliner
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Full playthrough video and screenshot galleries including design thinking annotation.
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Takes you through my initial ideating processes. Features Event Sequence and 2D layout.
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Learning hammer, issues encountered, and build process.
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How the project went, what I can take away from the experience.
Final Level Design
Playthrough Video - Level Summary
Walkthrough Gallery - Design Thinking
Level Playthrough
This is the final level played through by me. It's 17 minutes long, if you open the link in YouTube you will find a list of timestamps in the description if you'd prefer to skip through it quickly.
Level Overview
Playthrough Summary
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The player starts in The Observatory having fallen asleep during a game of chess against their colleague Devlin. They awake to an alarm going off on a control console, there’s multiple system errors, and a blast hole can be seen in the Quarantine Zone’s wall.
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The player investigates the hole and discovers their colleague has died and their accident has caused irreparable damage to a vital coolant system which keeps the Meteorite eggs from hatching.
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The player’s objective becomes to get back to The Observatory to initiate an emergency Incineration Procedure before the creatures overrun the lab. To get out of the Coolant Area they must find a way to turn off a valve.
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Their way back to The Observatory is hampered by the Meteorite growing and spreading out into the museum, blocking previously accessible routes.
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The player must travel through the Labs where they sight their colleague who has been taken over by the escaped creatures and turned into a monster.​
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After finding a way to return power to the 2nd Floor door into the QZ, the player can pass through the QZ via the upper walkways, which at this point has transformed into an alien jungle. Museum exhibits lifted by the meteor growths form a platforming route up to and through a 2nd hole in the QZ wall leading back into the East Hallway.
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Once back in The Observatory the player can activate the Incinerator, SYSTEM ERROR…
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Behind the player the now monstrous Devlin smashes through the ceiling from above, lands on the table they were not long ago playing a game of chess at and a different kind of battle begins.
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Upon Devlin’s defeat, the meteor growths create an exit route for the player via the Museum Entrance Hall, where the player discovers the alien life had long ago spread beyond the Museum’s confines, and it’s revealed the military is preparing to Nuke the immediate area soon... dun dun duuun!
Final Build Gallery
Presented in playthrough order highlighting my design thinking.
Quarantine Zone Transformation
Click the images for more information.
Pre-Production
Ideas - References - 2D Mapping - Level Sequences - Blockmesh concepting
Jam Themes and Initial Ideas
'Evolve' and/or 'A Special Place'
The jam themes were announced and we were off. We could chose to use 1 or both themes, I chose both as I felt they strongly complimented each other.
My plan was to very quickly explore and research a variety of ideas, let the dust settle and pick a concept to move on. I didn't want to get stuck in 'ideating' endlessly. Once I had something that had legs I pushed into defining the concept. I wanted the design nailed down quick so I could spend more of the jam working in Hammer which was a bit of a wild card when I started the project.
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First thoughts;
Big egg, tamagotchi pet, nurture, dark twist, home, growth, metamorphic, change, single location, monument, citadel, tower, statue, wishing well, archeological discovery.
Idea 1
I envisioned a bizarre scenario involving a character discovering a giant egg in their house’s attic during a stormy night, they for some reason decide to rear it, eventually the egg hatches and some time later the baby creature disappears, they discover it in their basement where the creature has grown large and attempts to eat them!
Idea 1.1
Then I imagined how cool it would be if the house all this takes place in has been quarantined by a huge container, literally dropped on top creating a wall surrounding the property and all artificially lit inside. The player would be the resident who has no idea what’s going on and the level would be them maybe trying to escape, or following orders being sent in from their mysterious captors, what if the player is on the other side as a scientist, a soldier, a maintenance worker?
Idea 2
Then the idea shifted to a cave where a meteor (the egg) is discovered and a laboratory is built around it (totally me copying the movie 'Evolution (2001)'. I felt the previous ideas were really cool but all over the place in terms of ‘world logic’ direction; was it all dreamy, fun, nonsense and metaphors or a more grounded sci-fi scenario? I decided to go with a more grounded sci-fi theme as I felt Hammer / Half Life 2 would work more seamlessly with it, I didn't want to pick any more unnecessary fights with the workload.
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Idea 2.1
I settled on a natural history museum setting where an exhibit (the meteor) has been discovered to be filled with alien eggs. The level will start when something has gone wrong in the lab leading to the eggs hatching, as the player progresses the environment is taken over by alien growths, and eventually the player encounters a formidable 'boss' creature before escaping. From there I started gathering references and working out a level event sequence.
Idea Reference Board
My reference board contains; movies, sci-fi/laboratory scenes, museums, Half Life 2 enemy types, and a collection of more bizarre perception twisting environment ideas.
I have the perception twisting ideas references because I was exploring my first idea (at home, discover giant egg in the attic) and thought some more unusual ‘dream-like’ sequences involving the house morphing and strange paths appearing would be cool to ‘expand the level’ and would free me up to introduce puzzles that aren’t narratively cohesive with a home environment.
Sketchwork
I didn’t sketch as much as usual for this project as I had a pretty clear idea of the level layout early on, so I concentrated on the creating the digital 2D Map in conjunction with a Level Event Sequence.
Start and End Twin Scenes
These 2 thumbnail sketches show an idea for the player’s views I had for the start and end of the level.
I envisioned the player would be introduced to The Meteor by an iconic framing moment just as they enter an important area for the first time, then at the very end of the level, the player emerges onto the Museum rooftop and is greeted by a duplicate vista but this time the growths are overtaking a cityscape.
I thought it was a neat idea to tie the start and end shots of the level together compositionally but in vastly different scales, and subsequently end the level on a truly bleak cliffhanger.
Level Event Sequence
Drafts and Final
This pdf contains all my early draft iterations on the level’s potential event sequences. Once I had a sequence I was happy with I neatened it up into a spreadsheet (see below pdf).
Note: You can scroll within the PDF Viewer window to see the rest of the document.
The spreadsheet was developed in conjunction with the 2D map (below). Before moving onto actually building anything 3D I like to have a solid concept in place. Once I move into Blockmeshing I’m quite happy to explore and deviate from any plans as I find my mind often floods with new ideas once I’m ‘In the level’, and if these ideas turn out to be duds I can always fall back onto the original plan.
Design Direction Summary
The focus of the level’s design at this point was all based around the player character’s Laboratory Colleague having had an accident which sets off a chain reaction leading to the alien eggs beginning to hatch uncontrollably. Not only that but the colleague is turned into a rampaging monstrosity by the escaped alien creatures, forming an ominous threat throughout the level.
As the player progresses the level environment changes as the meteor grows and spreads forcing the player to seek alternative routes back to the safety of The Observatory, where they can initiate an Incineration Protocol to try to exterminate the alien growths.
The level culminates when the Incineration system fails, the Monstrous Colleague appears and attacks the player and a fight for survival ensues. The level end has the player discover the alien threat has already spread well beyond the museum boundaries and the world is now at war.
2D Mapping
I try to keep my 2D maps super simple and focus on general area spatial relationships, key sightlines, what happens in those areas, and highlight any unique elements.
I created this map in conjunction with my Level Event Sequence spreadsheet; the spreadsheet acting as a high level overview and the 2D map making sure the level events will work in spatial terms.
While designing the 2D map I wasn’t concerned with ‘the museum’ location so much, it’s intended to be more abstract; rooms, routes, doors, set pieces, progress gating etc, so that when I create a 3D version of the level I’m free to riff on those ‘placeholder’ concepts however I like. This freedom means I could quite literally pivot the entire location setting while still using the events and level layout framework developed so far.