David Runnding
Game/Level Designer
About the Project
Role: Level/Narrative Design
Perspective: First person
Genre: Sandbox/Survival
Tools: Unreal/Perforce
Time: 7 Weeks
Team Size: 17
Introduction
The game was a 7-week school project at Futuregames. The intended design of the game was to make a survival game where the players would traverse in a vertical space. You start at the bottom with a malfunctional ship which you have to repair, upgrade and avoid hazards in order to reach civilization at the top of the world.
My work related to.
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Level Design - Ground layer and floating island world placement
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Points of interests
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Hazard/Enemy Design
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Item Placement
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Narrative Design
Game Backstory
In an overheated world, caused by the overuse of fossil fuel. Civilization has moved higher up in the skies due to the harsh nature on the ground. You find yourself stranded down on the ground due to your airship breaks down. To reach home once more, you must repair and upgrade your ship in order to climb the skies back to society.
Player Background
You play as a scavenger from the “Sandwalkers Guild”. Your job is to collect valuable resources from the old civilization down below, searching ruins for anything useful for the city. A dangerous job that only the bravest of people dare take upon themselves. During one of your travels, your airship has crashed, leaving you stranded, far from any help. To survive in this broken, overheated world, you must repair your ship, and restore it in order to get back to society once more.
Level Design
Map Density &
Vertical Progress
The core design goal was to create clear vertical progression, guiding players from the ground layer toward the floating cities above. Early prototypes featured a much larger ground area, but playtests showed that the scale worked against the intended experience. Players spent too long navigating horizontally and struggled to identify the next point of interest.
I iterated on the layout and reduced the ground layer to roughly 25% of its original size. This higher-density layout improved readability, ensured players always had a visible landmark to move toward, and strengthened the overall flow of the level.
Guiding The Player
Even though the game is a sandbox survival experience, I wanted the player to always have a clear sense of direction. To support this, I designed the level so that each progression point was visible from the previous one, ensuring continuous environmental guidance without restricting player freedom.
When the player first equips the ship, its starting rotation is deliberately placed to point toward the central pillar structure (“Old Town”), making it the most visible landmark in the environment.
Important buildings were also given locked doors requiring small gears (keys), to indicate their role as high value locations.
Starting Area
This area was designed to teach the player the basic mechanics of the game. Find blueprints, collect resources, craft items, repair ship and fly it.
At first glance, I wanted the player to identify the floating city in the sky. This was to hint their final objective and the goal of the game.
Old Town
This area contained a blueprint that let the player progress to higher altitude. Originally, the town was located on the ground.
However, playtests taught us that returning to the ground felt underwhelming and it took away the vertical progression aspect.
I decided to relocate the town and attach it to nearby pillar structures to represent the first attempt for civilization to move upwards.
This change also strengthened the connection to the nearby mine, where players can collect coal for fuel. The mines were placed at the outer edges of the map, and most players ignored them entirely. By creating a broken bridge and placing out a grapple-hook, players not only reached the mines more consistently but also understood their role in the progression loop.
Gear Factory
After collecting the blueprint in Old Town, the player needed a "Large gear" to craft the "Lightning rod" to reach higher altitude. I thought a gear factory made a lot of sense as a guiding point for the player.
In the first blockout, the factory was oversized and lacked direction. I reduced it's size, added a locked door to guide players toward the gear and introduced light platforming elements to collect the key (small gear).
Exploration Rewards
Because the game allows freedom of movement, I scattered optional blueprints across the map. These blueprints were not required to advance but rather affected the overall gameplay.
During playtests, players felt excited when discovering these blueprints and the rewards increased the value of exploring.
The blueprints could improve ship speed, food generation, stronger water, crafting tools etc.
Hazard Design
Hazards
The world the game took place in had no human NPC's. I was then in charge of designing hazards.
The game has four hazards in place.
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Tornado - A moving actor that damage the players health upon contact.
Moves along a spline path.
Spinning sandstorm VFX
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Officer Automatons - 1,5x in size of the blimp on the ship. Patrols an area a spline path when the ship is outside it’s line of sight.
When the ship is spotted, they switch mode to attack, charges the ship, dealing damage and goes back to patrolling.
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Steam Pipes - Hot steam that upon contact with the player depletes water meter faster.
Three states: off—> bubbling—> bursts
How it exists: World Placement
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Lightning - Hits the players ship every X seconds when entering layer 1 (12.000 altitude), dealing damage to the ship and push the ship down.
When upgrading ship with Lightning Rod it hits the Rod instead, causing no damage.
Camera Shake when striking ship.
Narrative Design
Narrative Inspiration
Mortal Engines - by Philip Reeve
In the Mortal Engines books, the towns are machines with giant tracks or wheels that roam the land and scavenge smaller cities for fuel and supplies.
The cities are build in tiers where the poor lives in the bottom, middle class in the middle tier and the rich up top.
It has the survival of the fittest mentality and capitalistic world.
Narrative Pillars
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Emptiness
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Harsh environment
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A desire to get back to society
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Capitalistic world
Player Background
You play as a scavenger from the “Sandwalkers Guild”. Your job is to collect valuable resources from the old civilization down below, searching ruins for anything useful for the city. A dangerous job that only the bravest of people dare take upon themselves. During one of your travels, your airship has crashed, leaving you stranded, far from any help. To survive in this broken, overheated world, you must repair your ship, and restore it in order to get back to society once more.
Complete Backstory
The world has been polluted by overuse of fuels; The environment of the planet is chaotic and unpredictable. The people have moved upwards with time. Overtime they have developed better ways to go even further upwards. In the early stages of this climate change the buildings were placed on top of pillars. The first and most important reason was that it became too hot to live down on ground. The second reason was that it was easier to see who came into the city rather than just building homes on top of a mountain. The poor lower class that didn’t have flying vehicles weren’t able to reach these spots. This way the rich were more in control. The people started to fight for their survival, causing the poor to raid these cities/communities. The rich started building airborne cities with engines to further distance themselves from the poor. The usage of resources increased which made the fight for survival even more present. Now the cities and establishments became even more difficult to manage. Smaller aircraft started to scavenge the lands of resources from old cities and establishments. This caused the rich to attack the smaller cities or trade with them in order to get their resources. They started to hire resource hunter to do their bidding. The greed of the rich cost many lives and unnecessary resources. Less people scavenging and less resources due to over usage. The major cities started to form an alliance and a plan to create one great city where the rich could live and have the poor go down to lower regions and scavenge rather than all of them fighting for their own small settlements.
Game Progression Loop
Goal of the game The players want to get back to the large city in the sky by gathering enough resources to survive and upgrade the ship to gain a higher altitude. Layers are used for progression purposes. You will only be able to reach a new altitude when you’re ship has been upgraded. Starting Level At the start of the game, the players start in a ravine where they have crashed. To get back into the air they must first repair the ship by finding resources on ground. Crafting the right tools and items will be done at the worktable. Layer 1 At this Layer the player can only access the towns on pillars. The players must scavenge resources in order to upgrade their aircraft. The aircraft need upgrades so it can go into a higher altitude. Starting out with a set amount of crafting recipes they must search the old establishments abandoned by the people to expand their knowledge of crafting by finding blueprints. Layer 2 Same with Layer 1, The player needs to further expand their knowledge by searching for new blueprints. In this layer you will have access to smaller floating cities that had been abandoned by the people. Layer 3 (End of game) As the player has upgraded the ship to advance to the third layer. They can now access the “Capital” city high up in the air. When reaching it, a short cut scene sequence plays a fade out that ends the game.