Side Scroller- Design Stage

My latest project has been to work as a year group to create a side scrolling game consisting of 4 levels based around the themes of Hot, Happy, Cold and Scary. I was assigned to work as part of a smaller team on the level design of the Cold level. All parts of the team worked together for the initial stage with coming up with ideas and themes for the level. We created a pinterest board pinning any relevant and interesting imagery to help inspire us and come up with ideas.

I created three mood boards of the themes of snowy woods, aquarium, and semi-submerged factory. However with some of the engine team opposing water in the level I had to try and come up with ways to implement these ideas but avoid traversing through water as much as possible. So I began to try and come up with some level designs, using the C shape our level would be places within.

I tried to portray some of my ideas with very simple shapes in order to work quickly and to see if the shapes worked well. My idea was to have the character traverse along tundra/ snowy forest, reach a clearing and fall through the ice into a semi submerged factory. But at this point the themes of each level were taking a slightly more traditional take on things and the possibility of a submerged factory or aquarium was a little too futuristic. At the same time the concept artist of our group who had been working on the theme of an ice palace came up with our first main concept. 

 She incorporated tundra, ice palace, factory/machinery and ice cave into an inventive design. We were all happy with this first design and began to see if we could refine areas.

At this point we had a strong feeling of the elements we were happy with so I tried to design some platforming elements. Yet at this point we were still uncertain how much space we had to work with in engine and how complicated we needed the platforming elements to be. This explains my two concepts which range from simple to complicated platforming. Yet our concept artist once again rehashed the idea slightly as we had some criticism of the statue in the palace only being seen from the side. 

The new idea allowed for a variety of platforming elements and incorporated a variety of themes. The idea of the statue being a mechanical construct with platforming gears and cave and tundra areas was kept. She added the idea of the statue having moving hands which would be activated when a bell was rung, There was also a variety of areas to find collectibles which would allow you to unlock the next level Scary. 

I did a quick concept of how I imagined part of the cave area to be. I liked the idea of the platforms being made of bamboo which would allow for interesting scaffolding silhouettes. Bamboo would also fit well with our idea for the side scrolling levels story that the character is on a pilgrimage across the levels. 

This is the final design our concept artist created. A lot of these elements she went over and designed further but this main layout stayed consistent. It was at this point that we began to create physical assets and blocking out our whitebox.