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The Spawn of Echidna release included one large open world area and two new dungeons. The timeframe was effectively three sprints (9 weeks) in total. I worked with Level design, Gameplay design & Set dressing for all three.
Dungeon - Queen's new lair
Situated inside of a crashed mothership, the Spina Queen has been consuming the lives of the scientists on board, converting the halls into hatcheries amongst all the wreckage. Early on in the design I wanted to have a slight angle to the ship for the narrative reason that it crashed into the side of a cliff. This gave me a red thread to work with: the angle and the positions of the meshes. Heavier elements got pushed towards the bottom of the slant, giving a more realistic buildup.
Main Hangar
I wanted to work with the lighting as a guiding factor. So I added in flickering orange lightsticks on some of the corpses spread around.
Underhangar
Since we expanded on the gameplay-side of the dungeon, we also wanted to expand on the themes. For the underhangar, I looked a lot at Dead Space, Alien, Prometheus and similar media. I discussed it with the art lead, and we were quick to decide that an emergency light meets infestiation theme was the way to go.
This area is the main puzzle area. After the players have fought off the enemies, they need to find a number of terminals, position a player at each one and then turn them on within the same 5 second window. This then leads to the next section of the ship opening.
Core Rooms
The Core rooms leads to the main boss arena. We tried a few puzzle elements, such as hidden keycards. But ultimately we skipped them. Going for a more straight forward combat block.
Dungeon - Spina Grotto
A second broodmother was sent to inhabit a cave near the crashsite. My role was to execute on a design brief from a game designer who held the stakeholder role.
The cave was already defined by an existing cavern, although it was empty and unstructured. I changed the overall structure to improve the readability of the pathing. Besides that, it was relatively straight forward. A lot of re-directing the players and thinning down areas by fleshing out the thematic side.
Open World Area - Echidna
The briefing for Echidna was centered around the entraces to the dungeons, which were previously framed as two basic craters with different flora inside of the open world area. Other than that, the early creature spawn maps showcased a very large area around a landscape "mountain", which I wanted to improve upon.
The Final Crashsite
The Barren Valley
The Final Crashsite was the follow-up theme from the previous release, Flight of the Scarabs. Thematically mimicking the previous two crashsites with a twist: that the ship had collided diagonally with the side of the mountain, giving the play area a slanted flow towards the wreck. The engine at the back of the wreck being the entrance to the Mothership dungeon seen further down.
I also included an image of the player campsite, and how it's new position is looking compared to its previous placement.
The largest area was also the one I had the least time on. I decided to opt for a valley type structure with monument rocks that divide the spaces inside, this gave way to a very easy 8-type structure for the hunting space. I had to leave it at a very basic level due to time constraints.
The Tropical Vale
I wanted to keep the original green and tropical color of the area. Giving it a stronger counterweight to the barren and dry lands on the opposite side. Like a part of the "old world" that survived.
As for the level design and spaces, I went for an interwoven 8-design; basically funneling players through smaller paths into larger openings at a high rate.
The entrance to The Spina Grotto is found in the vale.