Cyberthief
ROLE
Level Designer
DESCRIPTION
"Cyberthief" is an individual level concept, imagining the tale of Robin Hood through a cyberpunk lens. The player must infiltrate a corporate building and retrieve something important to them while remaining undetected.
This was a challenge project where the goal was to create a fully realized level with only a pre-made asset pack and Pro Builder in Unity.
YEAR
2023
GENRE
Stealth
PLATFORM
PC
LEVEL DESIGN
The main inspiration for the layout and aesthetics of this level comes from when I worked on the corporate campus of one of the three biggest tech companies in the world. The campus had very brutalist parking structures by the office buildings, but they were all separated by green spaces. The insides of the buildings were also very sterile, but there were some places that were semi open to the public for visitor access and guests visiting the campus.
The offices themselves were fairly open air, with minimal division between cubicles and the only truly closed off areas being meeting spaces or security offices/stations. Bathrooms were probably the only places that were closed off that didn't require some type of key card access to get into.
For the R&D level, the design was mostly inspired by general sci-fi shows that would show "labs" that focused on different things all next to each other, Some rooms were about medical stuff, others entertainment, and some with weaponized tech. These are mostly meant to be contained rooms with large glass windows allowing the projects to be observed safely from the outside by executives, share-holders, and the like.
The penthouse level was generally meant to resemble a high-end, luxury apartment on one side with an executive office on the other. The helipad is also there to provide executives direct access to the apartment and office with a quick way to get wherever else they may want to go without having to deal with mingling with the more pedestrian denizens of the building.
The idea of the network was inspired by the Megaman Battle Network and Megaman Star Force series, where most places in the physical world have similar areas the player can enter and explore in the digital world. Because this area is representative of a different layer of reality, the game play here is also different. Rather than being a stealth-focused exploration, it is more of a search and destroy area with some platforming involved.
In the initial design for this level, the building was simply going to be on a busy street. However, to make it more of a standalone level, I decided it would be more interesting to have it be a small island, only accessible by bridge or helicopter. This isolation adds additional narrative reason for the player to choose stealth, since their ways out once their goal has been completed are extremely limited.