Roger Gonzalez - Game & Level Designer
Levels & Environments
Eternal Night level design
Eternal Night is a Dark Fantasy Action Tower Defense Game. Players must summon various defenses to keep hordes of enemies from reaching their goal within each level. The main hook of the game is that each level has vast darkness with several lights to make combat more challenging and to even give an air of horror with enemies coming out of the darkness, though the option to increase overall lighting is there if the player so chooses to use it.
This is a solo project with most roles done by me, including the game design, level design, and scripting within Blue Print. Most assets are purchased, but most models and textures have been heavily edited within Maya and Photoshop to fit the desired level polygon count and overall game aesthetics.
Each level is meant to be played in the dark, with a high reliance on the scattered lights sources that are there, as well as the minimap that shows the locations of all enemies.
For Minimaps, the darker grey parts indicate the lowest parts of the map while lighter grey indicates higher parts of the map.
The Grand Stairwell
The Grand Stairwell's level design revolves around the player's ability to easily view most of it from a good hight, while also giving them the ability to easily jump down. There are side halls that allows the player to quickly navigate back where no enemies are present, however another iteration of this level where enemies do exist in that route, forcing the player to rethink their strategy.
The Ruins
The Ruins is a relatively linear level with both organic and hard surface routes. There’s little complexity involve as the level rises in height in a mostly straight forward direction that allows the player to view the whole level from higher vantage points. Some difficulty arises as there are only 2 small short cuts for the player to out maneuver enemies if they are behind their lines.
The Mouth of the Mine
The Mouth of the Mine is a level of mostly organic level design, featuring long turns within ditches. This is a more difficult level for players as it can be easy for them to fall in narrow points and be sounded by enemies, though plenty of vantage points are given if they wish to only attack from afar.
The Training Corridor
The Training Corridor is a very easy tutorial level as it features a completely straight path with easy to get to vantage point that are also a straight path.
The Docks (original Unity)
Divided Level & Environment Design
Divided was an action RPG from Lonely Wizard Studios created in Unreal. It had a strong emphasis on story and fun group combat. I was the Game & Level designer, as well as the programmer towards the end of development. I also supervised the modelers, animators, and was directly involved with the creative development.
I designed and built all known levels and responsible for all technical aspects.
Divided Level & Environment Demo
Ryugu City
Ryugu was the primary level of Divided, where the final version was meant to feature a great city of dragons actively being destroyed by assaulting forces. I aimed to give the level a very open and organic design, meant to show the peace before the war came.
The town of Daedale
Daedale is the starting town. It’s a small, humble town at the base of a mountains. The main character’s house is overlooking the town, exhibiting a more isolated and distant feeling.
Daedale Forest
Daedale forest is a rather small and linear level, with a single path that leads to a small but open area meant for the first battle of the game.
Champions of the Future - Kart Racing
“Champions of the future” is a is a kart racing game using real locations. I was commissioned with building the levels as close to as the real versions as possible.
I used screen shots from Google Earth and Google Maps to get top-down version of the tracks to build a nearly precise layout, as well as using some videos as reference.
For the Zuera Circuit (images immediately below) I used the height indicator on Google Earth to get nearly precise height to accurately create the terrain. I took some liberties to add some additional organic aesthetics, such as adding trees and mountains. I also did some texture work on the track to get a more realistic look, as well as decals to get the more details parts of the maps.
Portimai, Kartanlage, Kristianstad, Circuits (in order from top to bottom)
Alien 911
“Alien 911 is a hybrid 3rd-person shooter tower defense game that you can play solo or multiplayer.”
This is a released game that can be found and purchased on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/984220/Alien_911/
The player must build defenses to slow down or eliminate incoming hordes of enemy aliens in order to protect the resident ally aliens until they can be taken by rescue ships. Each defense that can be build takes up resources(points), but the player can either assign ally aliens to mine for new resources or to help defend.
I was commissioned to design 3 levels as top-down 2D maps for the game. I did a few different iterations of each until my client was satisfied. I used the program “Tiled” as I found it to be a very useful top-down level design tool.
I had to follow a few rules for the design such as
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The enemy aliens will take the shortest route to get to your ally aliens.
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The player can create defenses to block the enemy aliens or destroy routes.
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By destroying or blocking a route the enemy aliens must take the second shortest route.
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The player can make choke points to make fighting easier.
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There are teleporters the player can take to quickly travers the level.
This is a reference and guide material that I had gathered for the team to use so that they would have a better collective idea on the different directions the level design could go in.
Screen shots of the first build and map layout used. Only a couple of modular assets were used to create the level. The city itself is supposed to be made of cardboard, and so I made sure the buildings themselves had a messy, crooked look. I made one modular block consisting of a few different size buildings and build the city with just that.
Assets created by Will Clark and Nicole Jung.
Backyard Heroes was a Shooter with Tower Defense aspects about children using the power of their imaginations to battle against the evil forces of bullies in their backyards.
There were a total of 18 people within the team. I was within the game design team and the main level designer. Continueing on this page will show you various screen shots of the project.
Level flow chart of the enemy waves. It shows how the progression of enemy difficulty grows in conjuction with how much stronger the player becomes
Backyard Heroes was a Shooter with Tower Defense aspects about children using the power of their imaginations to battle against the evil forces of bullies in their backyards.
There were a total of 18 people within the team. I was within the game design team and the main level designer. Continueing on this page will show you various screen shots of the project.
Backyard Heros
Level & Environment Design
Screen shots of the first build and map layout used. Only a couple of modular assets were used to create the level. The city itself is supposed to be made of cardboard, and so I made sure the buildings themselves had a messy, crooked look. I made one modular block consisting of a few different size buildings and build the city with just that.
Assets created by Will Clark and Nicole Jung.
This is a reference and guide material that I had gathered for the team to use so that they would have a better collective idea on the different directions the level design could go in.
Level flow chart of the enemy waves. It shows how the progression of enemy difficulty grows in conjuction with how much stronger the player becomes