Overview
Role: Lead Designer, & Level Designer
Project Lifetime: August 2021 – December 2022
Team Size: 7 (Aug. 2021 – Dec. 2021) 14 (Dec. 2021 – Dec. 2022)
Engine: Unity
Screenshots
Description
Planetary Planter is a single player, open world, third person farming game where, instead of farming normal vegetables, you grow celestial bodies while exploring an alien world. You do this by exploring the alien world using exploration tools to find seeds and modifiers scattered throughout the environments. After planting and growing planets and stars you can harvest them. Once the planets and stars are harvested, the player can arrange them into solar systems, and arrange those solar systems into constellations. Players completing these constellations results in them receiving new exploration tools and getting more of the story unlocked to read.
Level Design Process
Designing each of the 3 open environments began with creating a Level Design document which outlined the specifics of the level, including a projected art asset list, and included a top-down map. Also included in this document were the specifications for item collection spots, the player’s access to specific tools, and the story pieces unlocked
Once this document was complete, I began working in Unity using ProBuilder to create a Greybox containing basic mountain ranges and platforms players would interact with. Once the layout based on the initial map was completed, the focus became making the Greybox fully playable with items to collect and distinct landmarks. I started by adding item collection spots, which were given logical contextual locations (ex: star seeds appearing on higher locations & ice-themed items appearing in the cold biome). The locations players would use various exploration tools, including bounce shrooms and the Worldweed (fast-travel), were also added in this phase. The final step was making these locations come alive, models and textures creating by Planetary Planter’s artists. Using Unity’s built in terrain tool, textures, height variation, grass, and various plants and trees were added to the existing terrain. Cliffs also replaced the Greybox mountain ranges using a modular cliff set created by Planetary Planters’ environment artists.