Henrik Sandin - Level Designer

Level Design & Game Design

Screenshots

Winter Is Coming

My main responsibilities were levels 1-8, 15 and the last level. When creating the levels, the first thing we did was create a design document. This contained all the information about level 1-20, things like difficulty, enemies, weapons and other information. We made a choice that every 4th level was going to contain something different. For example, in the 8th map, the player is swarmed from below and has to quickly climb to higher areas. Every 4th map and more had a special twist to them, since we had wall sliding and wall jumping we had plenty of room to be creative with.

(Climbing section in level #8)

(Weapon balancing)

(Sliding section in level #15)

During the last days of development, the team made a choice to add a boss fight to the game. The problem was that the programmers and the artist would not have time to do something unique. I asked one of our artists if he could quickly reskin one of our enemies and make him a bit bigger. This was done quickly and I started making a level for the boss fight. The boss behavior was like any other enemy in the game, following and shooting towards the player. My solution was to make a level where the player could lead the boss around in circles. To not make the fight boring and repetitive I triggered enemies to spawn during the battle, this was so the player also had to focus on other directions besides the boss.

(Boss fight)

In our game, we had everything from pistols to automatic snipers rifles. When balancing these weapons we wanted all of them to be useful in their own unique way.

The 2 different sniper rifles we had was semi-automatic and bolt-action. To make them both useful, the semi-automatic sniper could shoot faster. Meanwhile, the bolt-action sniper could penetrate more enemies, dealing more damage to opponents stacked together.

Winter is Coming is a fast paced Shoot 'Em Up where you play as a squirrel, heavily armed with guns. Your main goal is to take back your nuts from other critters of the forest. By any means necessary.

(All enemies in the game)

When talking to the artist about designing enemies, we all wanted variation in them. The problem was the timeframe, there was just too many other things that needed to be done as well.

Our solution was to create core models that could easily be re-textured. Our badger model was made into 4 different enemies, the enemies stats were modified and were different in, size, movement and range.