Ella-stick - Levels & 3D Assets for Nintendo Switch

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Overview/Goal

I worked as a contractor on Ella-Stick, a game that is developed with the Nintento Switch DevKit for release for the Switch console on the Nintendo Store. I was contracted as a level designer for 42 hours. In that time, I worked with a Producer, Project Advisor and the rest of the team to work through assigned tasks.

Media/Gallery

The revision of the 2D level plan that was used to create the whitebox.
Environment assets in-engine.

Contribution

Tools used

  • Blender (All 3D Modelling)
  • Blender (All 3D Modelling)
  • Adobe Illustrator (Map layout)
  • Unity (Probuilder for whitebox)
  • Microsoft Loop (Kanban board)

My Roles

  • Level Designer
  • Environment Artist

Contribution Breakdown

Tutorial & Hub Level

My first task was to create a hub world that acted as a tutorial. I submited my first draft quickly to get feedback as soon as possible.

My original 2D plan for the level design
A piece of feedback explaining the areas the producer wanted tweaked from the original design.
My final 2D plan for the level design

After 2 rounds of revision and feedback, production was happy for me to work on whiteboxing in-engine.

This birds-eye view shows how I used the 2D map directly in-engine
A top-down view of the island during the whitebox process.

Environmental Props

Afterwards I was given the task of making 3 environment assets - Bush, grass and shrubbery - with a shared UV map and material set.

  • Make a high poly version of a fern-like leaf, clover-like leaf and grass
  • Bake them onto a plane and create an appealing, cartoony set of maps in Substance Painter
  • Use the planes to create highly optimised models.
Paint layers used to add some toony lighting to the leaves as well as a seperate stem colour manually.
The bush is made of 3 modifiers - a radial array for the width, a linear array for the height and finally some vertex based noise.
Each bush part is only a couple of faces.

Reflection

Being able to create a level design with detailed producer feedback was invaluable, especially for developing my softer skills when it comes to working in a team environment. I feel more confident in my ability to take constructive feedback well and iterate on it too.

The environmental art portion was something I struggled a lot more with, but it still feels beneficial to know what areas I am less comfortable in when it comes to 3D modelling (Foiliage).