Bryan Grode
Wack Pack
By Team Untitled
Description
Role
Level Designer
Date
August 2025 - Present
This is an anti co-op party game, where you and 3 of your friends play four unique gamemodes. With a heavy focus on a wacky cartoon-ish art style, the current state of the project sees two of the four planned gamemodes, that being the payload and death match gamemode, In payload you and your friends both work together to rob a bank while also competing to see who will earn the most amount of money by the end of the game.
Game Images
Design Work
A lot of my work on the first half of development was on the payload level and working on a full art pass for it. At the start of the project we started by using blender to create a large scale level mesh for a block out that can be used to test some of the already programmed mechanics while we waited for the meshes for the ground to be completed.
When making the level mesh in blender I would refer to the rough level idea we made on a whiteboard for the idea on what we wanted for the time between and a sketch made in Minecraft, a level design tool used in a different project we as group worked on over the summer, The goal for doing our level sketch this was was for two reasons, the first being to get a good understanding of our overall level scale and length before the initial Blender blockout, and the second reason it let me play around with a different arena ideas for the levels so I can give our 3D artist an overall idea for the original asset list size.
However when moving into the engine, the original mesh did not connect well with the grid lines, due to these issues the level had to be recreated with the road meshes that had been finished by that point. Once the level was recreated I would begin added more of the meshes as they were finished while waiting for those meshes I would also begin adding invisible walls and enemy spawners. As I did this one of my main goals at this stage was making sure we were hitting the game time range for the level
Once that was done and we had our first round of play tests the level ended up being too big so we had cut down the time to half the original time. While doing this I would begin filling the scene with smaller props and weapons for the players to use. When doing this I wanted to make sure the city felt filled like New York, with things like hot dog stands, and trees. As we continued development a lot of the feedback we got in late December, about our level size and the overall cleanliness of the city streets so starting in January I would begin the third level rework ensure most if not all the seems between my prefabs were barely noticeable.
This reset also allowed me to redo how I would approach my city block layout, before I would have really small blocks. each block had no real network in for the alleyways with each building having a random placement with no thought of any back alley props that was being added during this stage of development. So during this time I would take time creating a more realistic looking back alley network that was more mindful of the props and NPC navigation.
With the inclusion of alleyway props and the smaller map size to avoid making the map feel super short and boring, I decided to to make two alleyway path that players would enter. The main goal for this section was to have one side feel relatively normal with only two arenas with the other being more punishing with more hazards, stronger enemy encounters and an extra arena.
Finishing out this level I would go through and add some of our newer props like cars, new weapons as well as some respawnable pickups so players had a reliant way to heal without needing to stay on the payload cart
