top of page
Frits de Laat
Level designer
About Crimson Monastery
This personal project was created to help improve and apply my level design knowledge and technical skills. By learning Trenchbroom and utilizing its existing game mechanics I could quickly set up some blockouts and start playing around with what the engine has to offer. The end goal was creating a full level from start to finish.
Level Breakdown
Top-down Sketch
Enemy
Pickup
Weapon
Door
Key
Lock
1
5
4
6
3
2
12
11
7
8
9
10
Full Playthrough
Process
I started out doing some engine research, playing with the systems at hand and figuring out the level design tools. I quickly got accustomed to how the engine feels and decided to just start building gameplay scenarios to quickly find what works and what doesn't. After testing a lot of different things I started building the geometry. I already had the idea of building a monastery, so I set up a Miro board with reference photos I could use.
During the building of the geometry I started adding the gameplay I had tested beforehand and planned out the flow of the level in my head of what I would like to happen in order. After the first pass geometry was build, I did some playtesting and iteration on it to make the gameplay feel smoother and make sure the intended player behaviour was working.
Reflection
I had a lot of fun building a level in Trenchbroom. There were some hard engine constraints I had to work with, such as limited available systems without being able to create more. But those constraints made it fun to play around with the mechanics and try to create interesting gameplay with it. Getting used to Trenchbroom was quite easy and I would love to create more levels in the engine.
This was a good exercise for me to test out my capabilities and just go wild with the ideas I could come up with along the way.
Frits de Laat
bottom of page