— PROJECT NAME
Lenli
— ROLES
Creative Director
Unity Developer
Game Designer
Level Designer
— RELEASE DATE
Feb 2019
- — SUMMARY
A single player 3d adventure platformer where players control Lenli, a young dragon who woke up in a silent world filled with frost. Tasked with restoring life and warmth, Lenli must seek out and restore large flower-shaped shrines left by his ancestors.
Along the way players are given the choice between traveling with a friend to help them over obstacles, or improving their own strength and proceeding alone. This choice attempts to create a difficult dilemma between relying on others or improving your own agency in solitude. We've kept the game without a strong premise allowing players to express, discuss and reflect on the importance of friendship, personal growth and self-sufficiency.
- — TASKS
Recruited the team’s members, seeking disciplinary and personal synergy.
Lead the creative process of the team, educating on game design models, implementing the MDA-model and Keith Burgun’s forms of play and guiding all disciplines in their research, concepting and iterating.
Lead and performed the development of the game in Unity and C#, educating my fellow programmer on C# as the project began, creating the player character controller and creating tools for level design and environmental vfx.
Took part in weekly lead meetings with the art and design leads to manage deadlines, spot and solve potential problems and monitor the emotional health of the team.
Level Design
I’ve created most of the third level in Lenli, working on the initial concept, blockout, tweaking, testing and optimisation. The way Lenli bounces around the environment makes even the slightest ledge or slope have a large impact on the player’s perception and routing. Additionally, the player is granted the launching ability at the start of this level, allowing me to create a level which allows for a lot of vertical movement and the crossing of large horizontal gaps.
The initial blockout was made using Unity’s 3d primitives which I later replaced with modular assets provided by the art team, who also did the decorating and lighting for the scene. Using verticality and small holes for the player to jump through, I was able to put occlusion culling to good use and keep performance high.
