Project Summary
Role: Open World Designer (Discovery Region)
Team Size: 25
Development Time: 6 Months
Genre: Omni-Directional Open World Experience
Editor: Unreal Engine 5.4
Platform: Steam
Process: Iterative Agile Spiral with Scrum
Tools: Perforce, Jira, Miro, Confluence
The Game:
Contributions
Points of Interest Collaboration
(Discovery Region)
Open World
Level Design
(Discovery Region)
Crystal and Teleporter Integration
(All Regions)
Open World Level Design
Imvi is a very unique game in that the player can explore the entire game world by using the Black Singularity to pull Imvi into its orbit and slingshot her in any direction. On top of that, each island in the world has its own localized gravity that reorients the camera based on where the top of the island is.
With this in mind, I designed the Discovery Region to ensure the player could view the region from any vantage point in the level and still be able to recognize where they were despite viewing it sideways or upside down. To aid in this, I made sure that each of the islands I designed were unique to give players something to recognize when they needed to get back to certain areas.
Another thing I wanted to ensure was that while there wasn’t a true primary path through the space, I wanted there to be hints of where the player should go in the design of my islands. My fellow designers and I used several different ways to draw the player down the general path to help make it easy to find what their way from island to island.
Point of Interest Collaboration
An important part of any team project is collaboration. Imvi was no different.
I worked alongside our fantastic artists to create multiple points of interest to help draw the player’s attention. From the Ryggurat to the limestone outcrops to the crystals of Chaos Canyon.
I even worked to alleviate some of their workload, and created my own material variants for different assets to help add even more distinctness to the islands of the Discovery Region.
Crystal and Teleporter Integration
Speaking of collaboration, I worked very closely with one of our programmers to integrate the lore crystals scattered through each region. Which not only served to give lore and unlock the shrines, but also conveyance back to the shrine once they had been unlocked.
Since the teleporters used a similar structure, I also integrated those at points to allow players to teleport back to the Shrine Island after discovering key islands in each region.
For each of those I adjusted the trajectory of the path back to the Shrine to avoid meshes that Imvi may bump into or the conveyance VFX might phase through. I also made sure the speed of the VFX and the player moved at a similar pace to give a sense that Imvi was emitting it or at least keeping up with it.
This wasn’t the only thing we collaborated on, either. We helped devise a variant of his asteroid belt with a rainbow of crystalline rocks that orbit the exterior of the Balance Region.