I had a pitch from the design team about a 'fairytale, knight, castle' theme for this minigolf, so I started by thinking about a story. Players will make a little trip, from the forest to a little village, and then they will enter the dragon cave until finally arriving at the big castle! I thought it was important and exciting to bring players into different areas and have this storytelling.
I think my favourite part of the job I worked on was all the little animals and particularly the dragon because it was a challenge for me as I'm not used to doing animals/characters in 3D. And I am pretty happy with the final result!
As I said previously, the dragon was challenging, but there are almost 300 objects in this scene, and with Powerwash's workflow, everything needs to be as clean as possible! And it's not easy to find all the issues, but thankfully we have a QA team!
The composition changed a lot. I had a lot of feedback from the design team during all the development to change this - move this -remove this. And also the materials changed, at first, the castle and rocks were really dark and not very interesting and 'funny' so we needed to find something more colorfull to match the idea of this mini golf level!
I think I have everything I wanted on this level and I'm pretty happy with the result, it was really nice to work on this one because I was free to do what I had in mind!
I just hope people enjoy the story, the colors and animals of the minigolf course, I put all my love on it ! haha
We had some rough guidelines from the James (Creative Director):
1) We want a Castle on top of a hill that can be seen at all times.
2) We want the course to spiral around the hill to the Castle on top.
3) We want the theme to be Story Book Fantasy (less Dungeons and Dragons, more King Arthur, and Sword in the Stone).
We started with research: Looking at real-world minigolf courses to get an idea for hole and course layouts. While thinking about the layout of our course and where each hole would be positioned, we decided to try and tell a story from Hole 1 to Hole 9. The story is an adventure starting out in a forest, travelling through a village, navigating a dangerous cave, before arriving at the outer walls of a castle. The player goes through training in the courtyard, makes their way through the castle keep corridors, and eventually arrives at the castle itself.
My favourite part was trying to figure out the layout of the holes. They needed to fit the space, draw the player along the 'correct path' and I also wanted them to be somewhat viable as real minigolf holes.
Trying to envision how everything would fit together. What was the scale of the objects? What sight lines did the player have? Could we hide and reveal areas to make it feel like the player is exploring and discovering the level as they progress? There were lots of elements I needed to consider as I was designing the level, but it was Laura that really helped pull them all together and make what I had in my head a reality.
The layout around the back side of the course, after the dragon. We needed to take the player up quite a steep incline, but we also wanted to squeeze in a few holes on the way. Eventually the castle courtyard-to-corridor idea formed and we used steps and stairways between the holes to push the player upwards.
We wanted all the holes to be fully playable. For example, if the player hit the ball in the dragon's mouth, it'd pop out the hole on its back, roll down the tail and into the hole. Hit the ball through the final hole and it'd roll down the gutters in the bucket. The complexity and time needed to get everything working and bug free just made it unfeasible for us unfortunately.
I loved working on this level, it was fun to use some more traditional level design techniques to lead the player on the journey through the level and to give a sense of discovery and exploration. I hope players enjoy exploring the minigolf course and returning it to its former, vibrant glory.