OLIVER JONES
Level Designer
V.O.I.D
Role: Level/System Designer
Team Size: 8
Engine: Unity
Development time: 9 months
‘V.O.I.D - Volatile Oddity Isolation Device’ is a single player 2D metroidvania where the Player is tasked with entering a run-down containment facility with the ultimate goal of repairing the inner chamber and preventing a world-ending catastrophe. As the Player navigates around the map and various areas, they’ll have to defend themselves against spiritual fanatics that worship the Void, all the while learning techniques to manipulate gravity and allow them to explore deeper into the containment facility.
Falmouth Expo 2023 Two time award winner:
"Supermassive Games Award" and "Fantastic Fiction Award" (Excellence in story/narrative/world)
Personal Contributions
​Level Design
Systems Design
Pitching
Additional Contributions
-
Git Management.
-
Working with Programmers and giving feedback upon movement and mechanics.
-
Working with Artists to ensure that level design blockouts can be replaced easily.
-
Working with Writers to ensure that level designs fit in with overall narrative.
-
In charge of running Playtesting sessions with various groups of people to enable for different types of feedback.
Systems Design
One of the key parts of any metroidvania, is the movement and mechanics within the game. After noting down many different ideas, we decided to stick with a gravity theme as there were a lot of interesting mechanics that we could experiment with. Due to scope, we decided to not include any enemies and focus specifically on mechanics and movement.
​
The most important aspect of the players movement was the jump. This took a lot of iterative design and playtesting to ensure that the jump felt right to anyone playing the game. This was something that we could not make drastic changes to while in production due to having knock on effects to the level design.
​
There were 4 mechanics/power-ups that I had to help design: Push and Pull, Flip, Orbit and Dash. To make these easy for the player to understand, we decided to include a pop up screen that explains what the power-up does, and a video showing the power-up in use. This drastically helped players understand how to use each mechanic to their advantage.
Flip
Push
Orbit
Dash
Some mechanics had to go through a lot of small refinements and changes. For example the "Push and Pull" had multiple changes to its fire rate and range to make sure that they cant abuse the mechanic to break the game (such as flying on a block). Another example is the "Flip" blocks had to be added in a lot more areas to stop players from being softlocked and losing their progress.
Due to the genre of metroidvanias, there are no "levels", so we had to add save points that allowed players to respawn from incase they lose all their hearts and die. These had to be moved around so that they were frequent enough to make sure that players do not have to replay large amounts of content.
​
Level Design
Taking on the level design for V.O.I.D was a challenging but rewarding task. I previously had not played many metroidvanias, so I played well recieved games such as: Super Metroid, Hollow Knight and Metroid Dread. I took notes from these games and also watched many design tip videos regarding metroidvanias.
​
After feeling more comfortable with the level designs within metroidvanias, I decided to start by asking what each areas objective would be. For example, the first area after the tutorial would be where the player gains access to the push power-up. Then I decided to design around this and make sure that the player is guided towards this objective. One of the ways I achieved this, was by blocking off a certain path and making it only accessible via the use of the powerup. This results in the player being forced to find another path that will eventually take them to the powerup. However the blocked path from before will stay in their mind and should allow for that "eureka" moment.
Another challenge that I had to face was working with cross discipline roles, such as writers and artists to make sure that level designs can fit the narrative and artists intentions. To do this, I would produce a blockout for a specific area and then work closely with them - asking for feedback and any issues or changes that they might want to see within the area.