This level’s design phase was to try and make a level that is heavily inspired off of the dungeons of Breath of the Wild. In the process of figuring out which type of dungeon did I want to make. The two types of dungeons in the game are the Divine Beast and the Ancient Shrines. The Divine Beasts are large mechanical dungeons with moving gear mechanics that the player can move around feature a number of puzzles. The Ancient Shrines are smaller dungeons that utilized one or multiple of the games unique mechanics.

The level takes elements of both types of dungeons. The level uses the mechanic Cryonis which allows you to create ice platforms from water while having to cross giant mechanical gears. The level is filled with chest that will test your platforming and exploration skills to cater to that type of player.

This project is building a whitebox that is similar in structure to how shrines are built in Zelda. Once the blueprints were created I whiteboxed a series of action blocks for this level.

The purpose of building the level like this was to build a bunch of modular pieces. These pieces all have their own puzzles and ways to complete it. Some only use a sole mechanic while others use a combination of them.

This method of level building allowed me to test out multiple types of designs in short amounts of time. Any puzzles that don’t work or are mediocre in quality I can just repurpose it in a new puzzle, and throw away the puzzle.

This level a lot of the blueprints I crafted myself. I made the three different types of moving platforms that are featured in the level, the checkpoint system in the level, the proxy treasure chest that spawn hearts, the collection systems, and all the cameras in the level blueprints. In addition, with blueprints that I created some of the blueprints not pictured here are ones that I altered the asset packs to fit my concept of the design.

The lessons learned involved with creating a more technical based levels than I’m used to creating. This level features the most blueprints I’ve created for an entire level ranging from basic ones to more advanced blueprints. Also creating a whitebox in an action box style to fit how many AAA companies tend to create levels. This level is a created to follow a more AAA structure of level design than the previous levels. The level is perfectly scaled and playtested with iterations made so that I could pass this level to an environmental/level artists so that this can be a fully built level that can fit in an official Zelda game.

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