PARAXIAL

Paraxial is a third person shooter, survival-horror game taking place in the early 90's in Lyon, France. You play Alexis, a new employee of the Euclide Foundation, that will be teleported into a parallel dimension. Alexis will have to survive and find a way out.

As the level designer on PARAXIAL, my mission is to create 4 levels and a boss.
The first level is a short intro, where the player will simply have to follow the corridor, take a key and open the door. It's used to learn to the player how to walk, run, interact with object, and that door can be unlocked using a key.

Papermap of the level 1

The second level take place in the Euclide Foundation. After watching a short cartoon introducing the foundation to Alexis, players will take an elevator to reach the locker room, where they will find their weapon and a key.
They will then reach the portal room, where Alexis will be teleported into the A.S.E.I. by accident.
This level is used to learn to the player how to open the inventory, and how they can interact with some object in the world.

Papermap of the level 2

The third level take place in the A.S.E.I., and its first part is named "The lobby". Alexis wakes up in a safe room and will explore the first part of The Lobby. In the first area, players will discover their first enemy by looking for resources to craft ammunitions and will find the key to explore the rest of the level.

Regarding the level design for the A.S.E.I., I had to follow my main intention:
Make players feel like they are in a labyrinth, make them feel lost, but indirectly give them benchmarks by using landmarks.
To do so, I used basic architectural form such as pillars, corridors and arch and make them unique by using simple settings sur as size, repetition and rotation.

This required a lot of reiteration and a lot of feedbacks from classmates and teachers. I also had to take in consideration some features that were removed or added during the production of the game.

Level 3 final papermap

Evolution of level 3 through time.

The third level is also used teach some mechanics to the players, such as aiming and shooting at enemies. One of my job was to create the UX and the UI for tips.

Learn to aim and shoot with the first mob.

To give the player a sensation of evolution through the game, we added doors to unlock that gave you more ressources, such as a flashlight or a shotgun.
Door were first designed to have unique design to make them feel more iconic, but due to short time we decided to use simple door dumbers, like in hotels.

First key

The fourth level is directly accessible after finishing level three. It take place in a subway station and the player will have a small area to relaxes, find some resources and save its party before entering the subway car.

Papermap of the level 4

Player entering the subway station.

The boss is taking place in an infinite subway. The boss design is still work in progress.

Credits:

Game Design:
- Axel Dobric
- Thomas Carbajal

Programmation:
- Simon Corté

Level Design:
- Théo Murgier

UX:
- Brice Capro-Placide

Narrative Design:
- Nathan Diolot
- Victor Sallaz

3D:
- Lorenzo Charton
- Julien Jiang
- Clément Piolet
- Benjamin Tausend - Hugo Journot

3D Animation & rig:
- Loane Dubuis
- Clémence Fleury

FX:
- Vincent Duboix

Concept Art:
- Roxane Amouyal
- Olivier Berthoux
- Zhu Borui
- Guillaume Caramelli

2D Animation:
- Sarah Blanc-Aïbout

Sound Design:
- Jules Lagarde
- Nicolas Tornaire