Atan

Atan is an action-adventure game where you traverse a massive colossus. Use your climbing skills together with your bow and anchors to journey over the massive giant. But beware, because this rough terrain contains many challenges, for the colossus itself is still alive and in need of your help.

About Atan

Level Design

Research on vertical Level Design
Sketching possible gameplay beats
Planning out the level
Blocking out the level
Playtesting
Iterating
Communicating with environment artists
Set dressing

Project responsibilities

This page is a work in progress

Atan is a project I worked on in the third year of my Game Design study at Breda University of Applied Sciences. This was my final team project where I was responsible of the Level Design while learning how to work in a way bigger team than I was used to.

Atan is released on steam and is currently really well received by the people who have played it. It is an action adventure game where the player needs to climb up a huge titan. The biggest challenge our Level Design team encountered in this project was figuring out the scale of the titan together with creating interesting vertical gameplay beats.

38
Developers

Unreal Engine
5.3

8 Months

Level Development

In Atan the player has to climb a giant colossus that is partly mechanical and partly affected by nature. Here you can see how we started with the rough blockout and how that turned into the final product.

You can really see how we went from working with flat surfaces and normal grayboxing to more in detail design, working with assets our environment artists made. A big example of this is the rocks you can see being placed in the level halfway in the video. They were first only used by our environment artists but I decided to use them for blocking out the level beats as well.

This created much more interesting climbs for the player and also helped us create a way more natural shape of the overall area. Our environment artists joined the team later so placing these rocks with the correct shape of the level in mind saved our environment artists a lot of time.

Scripted Events

I created this beat with the thought of the player needing to time the cycle of the gear blocking them, so that they can cross the bridge. When I made the first version it had a lot of issues with the biggest one being the camera.

With the scripted event tool I pushed for, we were able to create these camera shots and angle the shot exactly how we wanted it. I also had the choice of taking away the players input which wasn't necessary for this specific beat.

As you can see in the video the camera perfectly shows the player in sync with the gear above them which created this really cool feeling moment for the player that is climbing this gear.

This is a section in our last level. I wanted to use different moving objects in this level to make sure the game is not too repetitive. That's how I started using the moving pistons that are used a lot more in this level later on.

We knew we wanted to make this level a little more open, which meant we to had to make an end goal for this section. I didn't want to make a boring door + key system so I came up with this.

As seen in the video the player needs to move 2 pistons that block the gear (one piston is already unlocked to showcase the beat). The gear will let the player continue to the next beat. This was a perfect section where I could utilize the tool to make sure the player knows what their goal is here. It resulted in a great part of the level where players are required to do some exploration in order to continue.

I had a bunch of cool ideas for Atan, one of them being very short and sweet scripted events. I worked very close with one of our system designers who I asked to implement this in the project. The tool went through a lot of iterations to get it to a point where I was satisfied with it.

First it was hard to sell the team on the idea because it took quite some time to create, but once it was made the team seemed to like it a lot and I made sure to use them on beats that needed it the most.

Gear Bridge

Locked Gear

Vista Shots

In Atan, exploration and sense of progression is very important. That's why I knew we needed specific spots where the player could take a break and take in the environment around them. This made sure the player wasn't constantly in action and could also see places where they've been before.

On the other hand, we also had to keep showing the player that they're actually climbing a creature. This was a challenge since the colossus is so large, but we made sure to use these vista shots to frame parts of the colossus between the actual gameplay beats. In the video you can see examples of these exacts vista shots that are in the game.

Level Experimentation

Early on in pre-production we had to show our stakeholders the progress on Atan every couple of weeks. What me and my other level designer did, was work together on a level using the character controller and interesting level ingredients we had at that time.

We started off using moving objects and the rope shot as our main level mechanics. Later on we had a wind mechanic that was interesting on paper, but in practice we realized it disregarded the climbing a lot. These 2 levels were made quite quickly to showcase the mechanics and concept to our stakeholders, and they also helped the team figure out what worked and what didn't work.

Near the end of pre-production we discovered that if we have an interesting shaped moving object, we can do a lot with that on its own. This resulted in us focusing on just the climbing, swinging, and climbing on moving objects. That's where the first version of level 1 came from.

During pre-production I wasn't only busy making the actual levels. As seen in the images on the right the first thing that I did was setup a gym level where both me and the other 2 level designers can experiment different ideas for the main levels.

Like I said earlier, the way we did blockouts for Atan improved a lot and it's really noticeable near the end. In the second and third image you can see the experiments I did for what was going to be level 1. I took the parts of it that worked and implemented those in the actual level.

At the start of pre-production I wanted to make sure that everyone in the team had a spot to showcase and explain the features they made. So, I made a main gym for people to do that. You can see in the final image that people created rooms based of the example I gave them to showcase their features. This made it really easy for us to test different things in-engine.

Throughout this whole project I have done a lot of experimentation on the Level Design for Atan. The way I handled blockouts and overall shape language improved a lot in the span of these 8 months.

Here I will explain some of the experimentations that had major impact on the full release of the game, from start of pre-production to production.

Pre-Production

Gyms

Onboarding

In the middle of production I developed an efficient and effective way to create the blockouts for Atan. The images on the left showcase how I made and iterated the start of our onboarding level. This was something we had to get right, so these sections went through a lot of iterations.

My main goal for this section was to teach the player how climb, use the rope, anchors, and the leap. We decided to not give the player the bow here yet so that they are focused purely on climbing.

Level 1 was at the final state when the onboarding was being made so I knew that I had to make the level loop around itself to keep the correct shape. This also made it easier for our environment artists to set dress because they didn't have a lot of time during this project.

The final image shows how the start of the onboarding level ended up.