Impasto
About this project
-
Team: 20 persons
-
My position: Level Designer, Environmental Artist
-
Engine: Unity and C#
Impasto is a first person narrative and stealth adventure game. The game idea originated from the famous Spanish artist Goya’s black painting. We aimed at building a fascinating painting world that reflects Goya’s inner world.
My Design Process
-
Defining Game Metric
1. Prototype Materials
Screen shot of the material
These world scale grid materials will help all the designers to get a better idea of the scale of the environment.
2. FOV
Impasto is a narrative game with some horror elements. In order to create a tense feeling, we decided that the FOV should be 55.
FOV setting
3. Building Scale
We put buildings of different scales in the level and let people walk around in the level. Then we came to the conclusion that a two-story building should be around 8 meters tall.
The level playground
-
Setting up Level Rules
Impasto is a narrative driven game with a stealth system that serves as the core gameplay mechanic.
​
An important design problem for the stealth games is how to clearly indicate the danger in the level. So, it’s necessary to set up some clear level rules and teach them to players:
​
1. Orange light, Safe.
Red light, Danger.
Orange Lights
Red Lights
2. Use the same group of props as covers.
Covers
We want to set up a coherent visual language that the white rocks are effective covers. So every time we design a "safe zone", we use these white rocks.
3. Safe zone before each inquisitor encounter
Safe and Dangerous Zone
For a stealth game. We always wat to design a place where players can have an overall evaluation of the situation. Which we call safe zone in Impasto.
-
Designing Church Area
The church area is located in the center of the map. We want the church to be a main landmark that players can see from almost anywhere in the game.
​​
Areas that each designer is responsible for
1. Greybox 1.0
Gray box 1.0
So I start the design with making a very rough gray box (I usually call it graybox 1.0) and marking the details of each area on a design doc.
Early Stage Design Doc
Church area is a dangerous area, we want the gameplay and the experience also to be stressful. I designed a sequence where player had to go through gallows to hide from inquisitors. Then another sequence to go into the graveyard.
​
(the spotlight was cut in development)
​
Click to see bigger picture
2. Greybox 2.0
Then I created a more detailed gray box 2.0 in blender. It’s based on the gray box 1.0 but with a lot more details. The look of the church and the theme of each smaller area is fixed.
Gray Box 2.0
3. Polishing(Environment art)
​
Take the graveyard as an example. I placed a lot of grave stones in it, some big creepy statues and some wilt trees. I also added some red lights in this area to give everything a little bit of red color to help convey the danger of this area to the player.
The final result looks like this:
The Church
The Graveyard
Under gallows
Enemy Encounter