THANK YOU FOR 15,000 DOWNLOADS! To celebrate this milestone, we're diving into our level design process for BUNKER 73 and giving you an insight on how we collaborated and our processes for creating the level from start to end. Enjoy!

Bjørn:

Wow, 15k. Who would have thought our little scream jam game would make it this far. When we first entered that cramped meeting room after office hours to talk about our ideas I remember mimicking the camera flash and sensor with my hand as I described the final event. Someone said «LIKE IRON LUNG!!!» followed by «LUNGLIKE!» we all started chanting «Lunglike, lunglike» and the game idea was born.

Right before this project I saw a video on Gameplay Gardens where you design a small segment of a level to test out specific mechanics, like walljumps or climbing. Since horror is basically one big puzzle where each piece adds tension I wanted to try out this technique for our project, and managed to adapt it to paper by simply sketching out each scare as a top down map, marking player positions, paths and ghosts. Doing all this without booting up Unity or Blender helped my creative process a ton and I’m sure most people reading this can test game concepts in their brain at this point.

First part of the concept is a simple flowchart of how each room connects. Entrance is where you learn basic controls, and the first two rooms teach you the basics of ghosts. After that a door unlocks and you move on to more complex ghosts before the finale. Pretty textbook stuff. (Good) Horror is very linear and to effectively build tensions I want to guide the player exactly where I need them. That is why I drew a path and added points of interest with descriptions of how we would make you look this way and investigate. This approach worked very well and the team was quickly able to grasp my ideas. Plus it was exciting to see players more or less follow the path I laid out.

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Ollie:

Bjørn's level sketches clearly conveyed the room flow, but also outlined how each room would mechanically work, as set pieces. These awesome sketches not only helped me to craft the full level design, but also informed Anders on what opportunities he had for 3D environment art! Now it was my job to take this blueprint and assemble it into a full level design, with corridors and spaces connecting the rooms.

After a lot of trial and error, I got a rough little sketch done on paper! The biggest hurdle I encountered was making the connective spaces interesting. It's very easy to slip into the practice of making straight L/T corridors, and as this was my first real level design I had to put a lot of energy into making it interesting and dynamic!

This started with making the top floor (as seen on the bottom half of the sketches) asymmetrical and all wonky. No corridor is the same, and the rooms are connected by a hub space, with multiple routes to rooms. This gave the level some nice non-linearity! Then I disconnected the last few rooms onto a lower level - the stairs down feel like a descent into darkness, and placing the creepy bathroom set piece halfway down the stairs helped to convey that transition even better. We then had a second "hub room", with the ceiling shaped like a silo, which felt somehow unnerving.

Once I had this design together, we workshopped it as a team, and then I jumped into Blender to actually make it!

I made the cardinal noob sin of making all the walls two-sided - a nightmare for optimisation! This was fixed for update 1.0, but fortunately didn't impact the game much... phew. This whole process took about 2-3 days in the jam, then we focused on filling the spaces with ghosts, clutter and all that decoration. This was a super fun undertaking and we learned a lot by pushing ourselves further on this project.

We are so proud of this game, and when we released it for Scream Jam, we were joking about big YouTubers like Markiplier playing it... and here we are. Everyone brought their A-game to this project, and we all went crazy putting in whatever we felt was right for the game, no check-up meetings or deadlines, just a collective idea.

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Thank you so much to everyone who's played BUNKER 73, and we're looking forward to releasing more games in the future!

- NEVERSTATIC GAMES