Alice Madness Returns
Game: AAA, Spicy Horse, EA
Position: Senior Level designer
Platform: PS3, 360, PC
Release date: June 2011
TRAILER
Description
I was hired as a senior level designer by Spicy Hrose in Shanghai to work on the sequel of American Mc Gee's Alice released 10 years earlier.
I worked on almost all the levels of the game but especially on the 4th (Queen's Domain) and 5th (Dolls).
The tasks included:
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design or redesign pieces of layout, from the size of a room (like several rooms of the castle) to a whole piece of level (like the beginning of the 5th level, "The frog's way").
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build the layout, sometimes directly out of static meshes. Describe and ask for specific modules.
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kismet scripting, design and ask for gameplay features like the scales. Make short cinematics and animations.
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Write guidelines and mentor juniors at the end of the project to explain, help and check everything's done quality wise.
Game Design
The following diagram is an example of a document made to explain the basics of the way 'scales' should work. The scales are a gameplay feature used in the 'Queen's Domain'.
This kind of document was used to communicate the ideas with the design team and also the programmers.
Level Design
Here are walkthroughs of some of the levels I had the biggest input: parts of the Queen's Domain and parts of the Dolls world.
It means I may have redesigned/modified/completed some of them or created rooms or large pieces of layout from scratch.
THE FROG'S WAY
14 mins to the end --- Level design/Building
Beginning to the end --- Level design/Building
The main intention here was to play as much as possible with the dollhouse concept. As often, the concept arts were a great source of inspiration. But I wanted the payer to remember how tricky and clever these houses were with rotating parts, hidden rooms. So the main intentions were:
- flipping or flipped stuff: doors, pieces of wall, house upside down, etc
-> surprise the player.
- alternate narrow and open space
-> feel a bit oppressed and then get some fresh air
- back and forth, up and down, play with the house modules
-> play with Z axis and float between houses
- but give some hints on the way like letters on cubes, numbers on walls, etc
-> help the player find his way
QUEEN'S DOMAIN
From the beginning to 20 mins: Level redesign/ Half building
London jail and floating cards path.
Beginning to 9 mins --- Level half design/Building
Scales oriented gameplay.
25 mins to the end --- Level design/Building
Chess part 2.
From 16 mins to 24 mins : Level Design/Building
Scales introduction and Chess introduction
7 mins to 14 mins --- Level Redesign/Building
Chess part 3
22 mins to the end --- Level half design/Building
Giant Alice