The Project
Lodestone is a prototype level for a first-person puzzle game made in the Unity Engine. It was made for a level design final over a 7-week period by Half-Legend, a 4-person team.
In Lodestone, the player plays as a researcher trapped on a collapsing asteroid base. To escape, they must use mysterious alien artefacts to bypass barriers across the base to the exit. There are five major sections to the level: the opening, where the player awakens in a bathroom; the warehouses, where the lodestone mechanic is introduced; the offices, where a force effect is introduced; the courtyard, where the player finds the exit; and the reactor, a test of all the player has learned.
Please note: the ambient sound used throughout the level is an audio asset from the game Black Mesa.
My Role
On this project, I was the sole programmer as well as the only team member familiar with the Unity Engine. As such, I made the game’s mechanics and assembled most of the level.
Thanks to the game’s simplicity, I finished the mechanics in two weeks and put the rest of my efforts toward building the level. I white-boxed the basic level geometry, and then handed it off to my teammates to populate it with artwork.
Once the artwork was complete, I coordinated version control to combine everyone’s submissions into a single level. I added a basic main menu and end screen, and then took two tracks I had composed earlier and applied them to the menus to add some atmosphere. Finally, I provided some voicework to the office section to add an explicit narrative to the level.
Sydney Fonderie 