AMANDA MEGAN SWIGER
Level Designer
Past Projects
Tools
Unreal Engine 4
Adobe Photoshop
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Asset Packs​
Urban Construction Pack (UCP)
Urban City
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Level Design Partners
Nathan Kight
Samuel Roberts
FLETC Training Simulator is a serious game created in partnership with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and Drexel University. The goal of this simulator was to provide a medium for biometric data collection as trainee law enforcement are subjected to specific types of driving stressors. Our clients established the requirements that described how the game must be made to achieve maximum usability and efficacy.
As the lead level designer for this project, I came up with a rough sketch-up of what our city would look like. The project lead, other level designers and I agreed that a grid structure would be most effective in testing the player for the target integers while also keeping the design manageable. Our clients wanted a map that was no bigger than 3x3, but due to time constraints, we decided to stick with 3x2.
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Our clients also wanted a highway, and while originally the highway was to bisect the city in half (left image). That was deemed impractical, so the highway was moved to the north boundary (right image). We had a mutual understanding that the whole map would be populated with buildings and smaller details, so the sketch-up was used more to assign blocks of the city and to envision the layout of the roads.
To make set dressing easier, sub-levels were created for each block. Each level designer received two segments per block and were expected to try their best to stay within their boundaries. It almost worked as boundaries were more estimations of where each block ended, but in the end, this method helped to keep things more organized than if we were to have worked without it.
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A separate sub-level was created for the highway to further organize the level, especially since the highway extended across all three blocks.
For the whiteboxing phase, I laid the roads, sidewalks, and planes out to create the grid from the sketch-up for a 1x1 section. The other level designers created the proxy city using basic shapes as well as placed 4 types of buildings from UCP. After this was finished, I duplicated the 1x1 section to create the full 3x2.
Once the project lead approved of the whitebox, we began our passes on set dressing. Following our organization, each level designer replaced the proxies with buildings from the asset packs. After I set-dressed my block, I moved onto placing in the highway along the north boundary of our city. Once the major structures were replaced and to help make the city appear more lifelike, I moved onto detail set dressing while the other level designers did lighting and placed roadblock boundaries on the roads.
This is an overhead view of the city completed (the orange object is used for GPS tracking, paramount to the tasks tested in the simulator).
Tools
Unity
Audacity
The planning for Maraca Manuel was on whiteboard, listing out the entire construct of the game under the lead's eye. Because it is a mobile game, the idea of level design had to be redefined as something that would produce a challenge as the game progresses in a short amount of time and seamlessly.
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Maraca Manuel used procedural generated tiles that randomly streamed in as the player neared the end of each tile. The challenge here came from determining the exact starts and ends of the tiles and placing the sprites according to the margins so that they did not overlap upon loading.
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I created six tile maps per level while the lead Andrew Chok built the boss level around his programming, as well as three tile maps per our three power-ups. Once they were revised and approved by the lead, they were implemented into the game. Two tile examples per level (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (bonus)) are shown below.
The power up tiles were significantly smaller for the sake of focusing the player's attention to the effects instead of how many marigolds they could pick up, how many ghosts they could take to ofrendas, and how many devils could be avoided. For the Ghost Cat power-up, tombstones were placed around the power-up to immediately show the effect. The Magnet Raccoon power-up was emphasized by placing marigolds within reach and out of reach. Finally, the Slow Sloth power-up was surrounded by objects that could kill the player if they went too fast and needed more time to find a better-suited path.
Each tile was set to randomize and feed into the field of view for the play, speeding up and increasing enemies based on how long the player had been playing and as a standard progression.
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I was also the sound designer for this game. The sound effects were found online, and the music was chosen by me and approved by the rest of the team before being downloaded from Youtube.
Tools
Unity
Audacity
Handicatapult brings to the forefront the lack of accessibility that can be found in urban areas. Created in Unity, this game aims to make people aware of the disregard for disabled people with a bit of snark.
I was in charge of set dressing and sound design. For the tutorial level, there was less emphasis on making an urban area to fit in line with Stella building her catapult at home. The focus is to teach the player how to play game in a simple area first.
In the second level of the game, the problem (inaccessibility) was emphasized. With the models and changeable textures on the cars provided by the artist, I created the packed parking lot that the player must vault over to get to the building.
I was the sound designer for this game. The music and sound effects were downloaded from YouTube as well as retrieved from FIEA's SFX library and approved by the lead of the team.