remanence
An academic game project refined during its polish semester (level design)
Team Size: 21
Role: LEVEL Designer
Duration: 4 months
Software:
Unreal Engine v5.2
REMANENCE is an action-adventure game focused on melee combat with some light souls-like elements.
As the lead level designer during the final, polish semester of this project, I was responsible for designing, organizing, and iterating on the game’s interconnected levels, ensuring logical flow and pacing while creating space for the team to integrate combat encounters and set pieces.
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IMPACTFUL IMMERSION
First-person combat and exploration deeply engage the player, delivering dark and intense sensory experiences.
Ⅰ
DESPERATE DANCE WITH DEATH
Enemies react to the player’s movements and exploit mistakes made in combat, making every battle a hurdle to overcome.
ⅠⅠ
The experience of understanding and skillfully exploiting provided combat tools against increasingly difficult and complex enemy encounters.
NONVERBAL STORYTELLING
The narrative is hinted at through the environment and interactions, leaving much open to player interpretation.
ⅠⅠⅠ
ENGAGEMENT TYPE: MASTERY
game concept
HIGH CONCEPT DESCRIPTION
Long after a great war reduced humanity to a new dark age, a powerful evil still lurks deep below the rubble of civilization. You were chosen–perhaps, only by chance–to wield an ancient power, and destroy the demon born from man’s sin once and for all. Using a sword, fight against seemingly impossible odds as you dive into the demon’s lair of rubble.
DESIGN PILLARS
The Problem
No Top-Down Map or solid direction
Parkour section lacked meaningful gameplay (x4 speed)
The team didn’t have a cohesive top-down map of the level. This made it difficult to:
• Expand or reduce the level’s length logically.
• Help encounter designers visualize gameplay flow and plan new sections.
Additionally, the level had parkour sections (e.g., wall mushrooms) that felt disconnected from the game’s design pillars. These areas were unengaging and served only to link one section to another.
When I stepped into the role of a Level Designer, I noticed the project faced several challenges that impacted both the development process and the player experience in terms of level design.
Design Pillar Misalignment
Original city and skyscraper lacked scale and grandeur
While the level followed a generally linear path, certain areas didn’t align with the team’s design goals, for example:
• The skyscrapers, intended to feel towering and monumental, were scaled too small and relied on excessive flora to mask their size, obstructing the player’s vision.
• The city section was too short and failed to deliver the immersive, urban atmosphere we envisioned.
Collaboration and Testing Roadblocks
Disorganized files of the level folder in UE
Level streaming, implemented for performance optimization, unintentionally created barriers for collaboration:
• Sub-levels were disorganized with inconsistent naming conventions, making collaboration difficult.
• Team members couldn’t work on separate sub-levels simultaneously without conflicts.
Finally, the lack of testing tools, like God Mode or section skipping, slowed debugging and iteration, as every change required tedious manual testing.
THE SOLUTION
the vision
**I created the former top-down map to highlight the differences between the old and new layouts.
My goal was to rework the level to address the team’s challenges and align it with the game’s core principles. This involved:
• Creating Immersion: Enhancing the metro, skyscraper and city sections to emphasize scale, exploration, and atmosphere, making them feel integral to the game’s narrative and design.
• Designing Meaningful Gameplay: Replacing placeholder sections with purposeful transitions and encounters that added depth and engagement to the player experience.
• Improving Collaboration: Developing a clear top-down map and restructuring sub-levels to streamline teamwork and make iteration more intuitive for the team. Additionally, optimizing development by implementing workflows and tools to make testing and debugging faster and more effective for everyone on the team.
This vision guided every step of the redesign process, from planning to execution, ensuring the level met both creative and practical goals.
1 // LAYING THE FOUNDATION
The first step was to establish a clear, high-level plan for the level that captured the game’s thematic elements and ensured logical progression.
• Divided the level into key sections: Tutorial, Metro, City, Skyscraper, Tank Arena, Final Boss.
• Documented layouts in Miro, adding encounter placement and pacing notes for team alignment.
• Organized sub-levels with consistent naming conventions to enable simultaneous teamwork.
2 // Redesigning Key Areas
With the top-down map in hand, I began the process of reconstructing the level by whiteboxing the layout, integrating reusable sections from the old level, and designing entirely new areas to fill in the gaps.
WHITEBOXING THE GENERAL LAYOUT & REUSING OLD SECTIONS
In-game city reveal showcasing the expanded layout and immersive scale
To establish the level’s foundation, I created a rough whitebox of the entire map and identified reusable segments from the old level. These sections were carefully adjusted and integrated into the new design, ensuring they aligned with the updated flow and design pillars.
• Blocked out the entire level to visualize scale, progression, and transitions.
• Adjusted, relocated and snipped together older segments into their designated sub-levels (e.g., 1_Tutorial, 2_Metro, 3_City), improving their fit within the new layout.
COMPLETING THE MISSING PIECES
To finalize the level, I focused on designing and whiteboxing the missing sections, including the City, Skyscraper, and Final Boss Arena, while integrating key set-pieces that tied the narrative and gameplay together.
City Section:
• Extended and scaled buildings for a true urban feel.
• Integrated this section into the existing layout.
• Developed the city reveal as a set-piece to emphasize the dystopian scale and atmosphere.
Initial sketches and blockouts of the final arena
Final iteration of the rooftop garden arena
KEY ACTIONS
• Created early preliminary sketches to outline the level’s blocky layout and improve its realism, particularly in the city section.
• Focused on embodying the game’s dystopian feel through monumental skyscrapers and a cyclical structure that reinforced player progression.
• Developed a comprehensive top-down map to serve as a blueprint for the entire level, ensuring all sections logically connected.
Final Boss Arena:
• Conceptualized the arena as a rooftop church, aligning with the narrative.
• Created early designs of the church concept, focusing on monumental, brutalist architecture and player flow.
• Iterated on the design, adapting it into the final rooftop garden layout to suit team feedback
Elevator:
• Provided vertical traversal between the City and Skyscraper, creating a realistic and thematic connection while preserving the imposing scale of the skyscrapers.
Skybridge:
• Introduced a visually striking horizontal transition that replaced placeholder traversal mechanics.
• Connected buildings with a path that enhanced the level’s architectural coherence and visual interest.
Monorail:
• Designed as a diegetic above-ground transportation system to link distant sections efficiently.
• Balanced immersion and pacing, offering players a faster traversal method without breaking the world’s narrative logic.
3 // Refining Pacing and Flow
To ensure the level felt cohesive and engaging, I focused on refining the player’s path through encounters and creating diegetic transitions that maintained the level’s scale while minimizing unnecessary traversal time.
Early development layouts showing the foundational level structure, blending new whiteboxes with repurposed sections from the original level
Early designs for the Final Boss Arena, exploring a rooftop church concept
The outcome
Here is the trailer for our game!
Through careful planning and redesign, I helped transform the level into a cohesive and immersive experience that supports Remanence’s design pillars. By integrating monumental environments like the skyscrapers and city, along with diegetic transitions such as the elevator, skybridge, and monorail, the level now offers smoother pacing and logical flow. These improvements enhance exploration, combat encounters, and environmental storytelling, creating a more engaging and memorable experience for players.
Surprises that shaped Design Direction
1 // scale and pacing
key learnings
obstacles faced
1 // communication
One of the biggest challenges during development was the lack of effective communication channels within the team and across disciplines. This gap often led to misunderstandings, resulting in conflicts and significant work being scrapped or redone.
2 // unorganized task tracking
A major challenge was the absence of task tracking tools, which left many team members, including myself, feeling lost about our responsibilities and progress within the project. Without a centralized system to manage tasks and deadlines, it was difficult to stay aligned, prioritize work, or understand how individual contributions fit into the bigger picture. This lack of structure often resulted in confusion, missed opportunities for collaboration, and inefficiencies that could have been avoided with proper task management tools.
3 // lack of testing tools
The lack of proper testing tools made evaluating the level for pacing, flow, and direction incredibly tedious. Without features like a debug mode or level skips, I often had to play through the entire sequence repeatedly just to test specific areas. For example, I had to defeat enemies, wait for doors to open, and progress through multiple sections — only to start over entirely if I died. This time-consuming process slowed iteration and made it harder to address feedback efficiently.
Designing Remanence taught me to balance scale, pacing, and technical limitations. Organizing the level to feel logical and true to real-world scale raised optimization concerns from the tech team. To address this, I used level streaming to hide previous areas and load new ones seamlessly, including lighting and enemy placement. Transitions like elevators helped maintain immersion while optimizing performance. These challenges reinforced the importance of creative problem-solving and collaboration in game development.
2 // separation of responsibilities
One key takeaway from this project was understanding the importance of respecting team workflows and maintaining clear boundaries between disciplines. Early on, I created highly detailed whiteboxes to guide the visual design, but this unintentionally made it harder for artists to adapt and replace assets, as my workflow didn’t align with theirs. I learned that focusing on my own responsibilities and providing room for other disciplines to work within their processes is more efficient and fosters better collaboration.
Reflections
Remanence gave me a chance to learn how rewarding it is to work with a full team on an extended project, but also taught me about the challenges that can come with it. I realized how important it is for a large team to have a clear and specific vision for what you’re doing. Without it, you risk having the team drift in different directions, which leads to conflicts and wasted time because people don’t know what needs to be done on both a technical and conceptual level. This project also showed me why task management tools are essential to keep everyone organized and on the same page. Despite the challenges, it was a really rewarding experience to see everything come together through teamwork and finally finish.