Non-Euclidean Level Design Demo news

First off let me start by apologizing for having been very quiet with updates from my work on Eraser since the last article in May. I've recently had a baby and she has take up a significant portion of my time over the past month. I have still been working on Eraser and have been focusing on 2 main areas:

1) Non-Euclidean Level Design

2) Asset Management

So lets start with the non-euclidean level design. Your probably wondering what that actually is so I made this demo in unreal engine that should hopefully give you a better idea.

As you can see from that video, non-euclidean level design is basically the creation of impossible spaces. Think The Shining and all the impossible doors and walls. The idea is that this style of level design will force the player to explore all of the spaces that will be available to them in Eraser and to start to think about the game spaces in a different way, opening the door to some funky puzzles that will hopefully seem fresh and be reasonably challenging, even to veteran gamers that can spot most puzzles from a mile away. This leads me into my second area, Asset Management!

The whole scene in the video above is made out of 5 core, re-usable assets and some super simple code that controls the visibility of some additional walls. This collection of assets would essentially let me build a whole network of hallways and corridors, laced with impossible spaces, ready to challenge the player. Obviously this is an extremely rough demo and there will be significantly more areas than just corridors for the players to explore but the principle remains that modular, re-usable assets are the way to go, massively speeding up level design, prototyping and development times meaning I can spend more time of art assets, polish, voice overs, interactions and all that other good stuff!

I'm throwing myself back into the development of Eraser so expect to see more from me soon, untill then please check out my website at www.lucasgracia.com for more information about eraser and my other projects and follow me on twitter @lucasgracia13 to keep up to date on all the media that gets produced for Eraser (it normally gets posted on twitter first just because I don't have to write an article to accompany it or edit anything!)

Thanks

Lucas