Overload
Severed Steel is a movement shooter developed by Greylock. Fascinated with the game and its open editor, I decided to develop my own level to practice designing for FPS games. The level, featured to the right, was built from the ground up in one month, with a focus on developing interiors that feel good to navigate at high speeds. Below I will highlight the documentation and process of designing this level, dubbed “Overload”.
Designing for Speed
When designing Overload, special care was taken to develop interiors around the player's capabilities. Given the speed and agility of the player character, rooms were designed so that the player would never get caught at a dead end without an alternate route. Multiple rooms also make heavy use of elevation, giving players plenty of opportunity to wall jump, double jump, and dive their way into better positions.
The lobby has multiple wall jump points that allow the player to flow around the room in a figure 8 pattern
Finding Unique Ways to Vary Movement
To ensure that every setpiece doesn’t feel entirely similar, a number of rooms are designed to give players different ways of interacting with the space outside of running and jumping. This was achieved by designing interiors to cater to multiple forms of traversal, as well as restricting the size of rooms on occasion to force players to interact with the space in a different way.
The office room features cubicles and walls that create multiple ways to traverse the space while avoiding the long hall sight lines.
Creating Encounters
FPS combat encounters can best be described as a puzzle. Types of enemies and their placements heavily encourage different styles of play, so when developing the interior, it was important to take into account which enemies would be best suited to each space. Each encounter was designed around the interior, with painstaking measures taken to find the right balance of difficulty.
Looking back at the office room, two snipers have been placed in the firing lanes at the back of the room, encouraging the player to utilize the cubicles and side paths to safely close the distance.