Concept Art for Capstone

For my capstone project this year, I am serving as a level designer for a medieval knight game in which a knight travels to purgatory to kill a god. I have been tasked with creating the throne room and cathedral for the god. This will be the primary space where the main gameplay will take place. This area serves as the arena for the boss battle.

The direction I received specifies that the area needs to be a large, open play space with no places to hide. This design choice ensures that the boss AI cannot lose track of the player or encounter issues such as bumping into columns or other structures.

I began by researching throne rooms and cathedrals from the Gothic era but soon shifted my focus to Romanesque architecture, a precursor to Gothic. I decided on a chamfered triangle shape for the general play space and contrasted that with a circular dome roof. To avoid an empty feel when entering the space, I filled it with church pews and fire braziers to illuminate the area. All of these props are designed to be destructible, preventing them from becoming obstacles when the player is running through the space dodging attacks.

I started by creating a basic pencil sketch of the space on scrap paper and then began to block it out in Unreal Engine. Once I was satisfied with the general look and size of the space, I took a screenshot into Photoshop to conceptualize how the space could look once fully fleshed out. This process also provided our lighting artist with a clear idea of my intentions for the space's lighting requirements.