Summary

Sniper Mission is a level consisting of third-person action and stealth gameplay. The main character is an Allied soldier tasked with sabotaging five anti-air guns, as well as assassinating the enemy commander.

Playable Build Link

Team Size: Solo

Average Playtime: 10-15 mins

Responsibilities:

Level Design
Layout Drawing
Blueprint Scripting
AI Path placement

My Process

Concept: What is the desired emotion for this level and how it is supposed to change during the playthrough.
Consistency: How significant is this space in the overall story? Why and how it has changed during the story events? How it came to be as it is now and how will I reflect this in level design?
Planning: How do I set up player's path, objectives, items and enemies in a balanced order?

References

Before I began blocking out the level, I gathered a small number of references in order to better convey the feeling of northern France countryside and the overall aesthetic of the World War II.

These references carry information regarding the organic and inorganic details of the environment, as well as the scale of structures and topographical features.

Level Overview

Inspirations

Hitman
Sniper Elite

Goals

Design a semi-linear level with clear objectives.
Intuitively guide the player towards objectives without exposing them too much.
Encourage both stealth and action approaches of gameplay and reward the player accordingly.

Tools Utilized

Unreal Engine 5
Ultra Dynamic Sky
IWALS by Jakub W

Design Focus

Enemy Types

The level has three distinct enemy types:

Regular Enemies
Sniper Enemies
Axis Officer

Composition is an important part of my design process. I tend to utilize lighting, shapes and colors to make significant areas and vistas more identifyable.

Composition

This level is particularly designed in a semi-linear approach. Which means that it is highly likely for different paths to end up in the same chokepoint. Semi-linear progression works well with backtracking and is more helpful for establishing controlled environments such as tutorial areas .

Stealth & Action Combined

Semi-Linear Approach

Both types of gameplay are encouraged and rewarded. It is possible to use a combination of stealth and action at every stage of the level.

I needed to implement some blueprint code in order to make gameplay objectives more tangible. I also added some splines to bring movement to the environment.

Objectives

AA Guns

A custom blueprint logic was implemented for AA guns. Which made them explode after 5 seconds of planting the explosives.
The explosion also generates a sphere trace for the player. If within range, the player dies.
The logic is handled in the level blueprint.

Airplane Splines

I wanted to add a spline blueprint for Allied bombers
They are not effective at all, but they bring a nice movement to the environment.
Once the timeline ends, the plane's position resets and starts flying over again.