THE FINAL FLOOR

The Final Floor was a prototype for a game concept, made in roughly 2 months. My objective with this project was to refine an idea I had had for some time in writing, then learn Unreal Engine 5 and polish up my level design and environmental storytelling skills. This was my first project with Unreal Engine 5.

A lot of the development time was spent refining design documents and drafting out concepts for the level. In the final build, there would be a level for every floor on the elevator, but for the prototype, I decided to build out and design the City of Shadows. In The Final Floor's final design, enemies would continue to spawn until a boss monster arrived, and slaying that boss monster would end the floor. The game also had a very high focus on fast-paced movement, and so I wanted to design a level that acted like a free-form jungle gym for the players to dart around on. The City of Shadows has high verticality with many, many routes from one location to another. To encourage players to move, high-damage sniper enemies would spawn at different locations. These enemies were difficult to take out without moving closer to them.

As for the movement mechanics of the game, it was very important to me that the player had lots of options to get around. With that said, I also believe that limits can make players more creative - certain mechanics that could have been unrestricted, like the Wall Run, were limited to specific locations around the level. This was, in my opinion, more interesting simply because of the existence of Burst - an ability that gave you perfect air control and stopped you from falling in the air. With limited Wall Run locations, you could instead use Burst to mimic the effects of a Wall Run on any wall (or even just use it to take impossible corners in the air) for a limited time. Speed in the air is uncapped in The Final Floor, but touching the ground begins to rapidly reduce your speed back to its grounded maximum. As such, using Bursts, Wall Runs, and other mechanics to stay airborne was very important to getting around quickly, and influenced the design of the level immensely.