EWE FEW CREW | David Lopez

Role: Level Designer

Tools Used: Unity

Duration: 8 months

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Ewe Few Crew is a cooperative sailing adventure built in Unity where players must work together to navigate a ship and protect their flock. The goal was to design a game that required collaboration — players control different ship stations to steer, manage sails, fire cannons, and defend against the kraken while keeping the sheep safe.

NAVIGATE

Team Size: 6 members

Walk around the ship and use the stations to your disposal, to move the ship, speed up the movement, and kill the kraken through the seven seas as they try to steal your sheep

INTERACTIONS

Work together with your partner and discover the different options to destroy and eliminate the kraken. Use the cannons, control the ship's velocity and sail your way to victory

KRAKEN

GAME TRAILER:

The kraken you'll encounter vary in different areas of the map. Shoot them down before your sheep get taken away

LEVEL DESIGN PROCESS

To begin the level design workflow, I first took inspiration from games such as Sea of Thieves, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which fall into the same game genre. Sea of Thieves was a great game to use as a reference, as it conveyed a great sailing experience and gave off the perfect aesthetic

At the start of the project, my team and I considered creating a 1 vs 1 game, where one player would deliver packages to one island and another would be the enemy ship, trying to eliminate the delivery player. However, we felt that making a game like that would take way longer than the time given to us. Therefore, we switched to a 2-player coop experience, which would make the game more enjoyable and soft-paced.

After deciding on the theme and mechanics of our game, my other level designer and I started working on the levels. We started by first greyboxing our level and then replacing them with assets after our artists finished them.

We also made many adjustments to the game, such as getting rid of unnecessary space the player wouldn't use, and adjusting the size of the assets. For example, the trees were smaller than the ship, and it looked weird since in the real world, trees are bigger than ships.

The level begins in a sea where the character must steer the ship and navigate around cliffs and islands. They then encounter many kraken tentacles along the way that take away their sheep if they are not taken down in time. Initially, the level was set up in a way where the player could just sail in a straight line and not have to use the mechanics a lot as they would get to the finish without any danger or feeling any pressure. After getting a lot of feedback from many playtesting sessions, we realized that the player was not using all the space we provided them with in the map. We got rid of the space the players never used, as that makes the level look badly designed. This made things tricky for me and the other level designer since we had to reorganize all the obstacles and create new linear layouts to be able to get the proper difficulty working again and had to play through the level multiple times

I continued to work with the other level designer on the team so we could get started on greyboxing the next two levels for the game. It accomplished the sailing and gameplay experiences we were looking for.

Brainstorming:

Ideas Discussed

Key Points Made

Made a playable prototype

These are the key points that my teammates and I developed after a thorough discussion. We asked ourselves questions like: "What is the purpose of our game?, What is the inspiration?, What makes the game fun? To answer all this, we determined the mechanics and then discussed how we wanted them to function in the game. As I mentioned earlier, we had the basic steering controls and movement set up, and the navigation all set up. Once all the mechanics had been properly implemented into the game, we started the level design making process. We had a short and basic map designed so that we could have a map where the player can move around to use the mechanics. The game was not fun, as the ship's speed was very low, meaning the player would see that they were not moving at all or moving very slowly. Our prototype at the end was a very slow sailing ship with basic steering controls. And all the assets in the map were poorly made, meaning the prototype had no excitement. The game improved a lot as we improved the quality of our levels and replaced the assets with those made by our fellow artists, md added the new mechanics with different stations in our ship.

Level Diagrams/Layouts

Greyboxed Level

Final Level

Here is a picture of what I mentioned earlier. During the level design process, our level was very open world and had a lot of useless space as I was greyboxing. In the final level, I have narrowed it down as a more linear level so the player uses all the given space and can use the mechanics to their full potential. After making the final first level, me and the other level designer started designing the other levels with similar layouts and also increased the difficulty in them by adding more obstacles the player has to navigate around to not lose their sheep as when they crash into an obstacle they lose one of their sheep.

PROJECT GOALS:

Create levels according to theme:

After coming up with our sailing boat theme and how two players would work together on the ship, me and another level designer started to design and greybox different layouts/maps where the player(s) can sail around in. We designed different paths they can take with obstacles our artists designed such as rocks, islands, and cliffs. We wanted to make sure our levels would vary in an easy-to-difficult order, so I took responsibility of making the last two by including many rocks and islands that would make tricky paths for the players to navigate in.

After defining our sailing-boat concept, I worked with another level designer to greybox multiple maps. These layouts included rocks, cliffs, and islands (created by our artists) to form navigable paths. I focused on later levels, adding tricky routes filled with hazards to increase difficulty and variety.

Levels Utilizing Sailing Mechanics:

When making the levels, we made sure to design them in a way that the player can use all our game mechanics. For example, for the player to use the cannons, we included tentacles for the players to kill so they wouldn't lose their sheep. Another mechanic was to make sure they can adjust their speed, which they can handle by moving the sail up and/or down. This can help them avoid running into obstacles.

Unlike smaller projects I had worked on before, this game required multiple input systems and complete feature integration. It was challenging, but it pushed me to expand my design skills, collaborate more deeply with programmers, and help deliver a fully playable experience.

Make a Complete Game:

We wanted to make a game that had every system featured and completed. In all the previous projects I've worked on, I've only been using the basic Unity Engine scripting, and features , however, this time I had to get a bit more adventurous with it since the game required different input systems, It was quite a struggle but I was happy that me and my team were able to get this done and make it fun and enjoyable.

TAKEAWAYS:

- The simpler the game loop is, the easier it is to design simple worlds

- Collaborating with another level designer required constant communication, but once our workflow was established, the process became efficient and enjoyable.

- Even in linear levels, offering branching paths gives players meaningful choices and increases replayability.