Written By: Galia Curry
SEP 22 - SEP 28
Coming into this module without any prior knowledge of game engines felt overwhelming. I was worried about not finishing the task on time and meeting my own expectations. I have ambitious ideas for what I want to create, but I sometimes struggle to keep the scope manageable. Level design isn’t my strongest skill—I’m no architect in that area —but I always put in my best effort when tackling a task.
In this module, we have the opportunity to experiment and modify various elements within a simple framework. The options include Flappy Bird, a 2D platformer, a topdown game, or an FPS. I immediately chose the FPS mod.
WEEK 2 - RESEARCH
SEP 29 - OCT 5
This week, even though I was focused on the FPS mod, I decided to research the other mod options. While 2D games have such a rich history, I realized I don’t know much about most of them, and I didn’t feel inspired to try making one. However, if I were to attempt the Flappy Bird mod, my idea would be to have “Mario” jumping as you press the spacebar to avoid pipes. I didn’t have any ideas for the 2D platformer or top-down mods.
If I were to create a mod from scratch while incorporating one of the four elemental factors, I’d choose to make a 3D platformer. However, I reminded myself to keep the scope small.
I made a schedule for weeks 1-4 for what should be completed during those times. Once I make a decision and create a layout I’ll then know what to add for the other weeks:
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Research & schedule
Week 3: Making a decision
Week 4: Create a layout of the level
WEEK 3 - THE DECISION
OCT 6 - OCT 12
My main challenge this week was deciding between three game mod ideas and planning their layouts. The first idea I’ve been developing since March, I even created a document outlining the characters, weapons, and world. I drew inspiration from games like Overwatch, Valorant, Marvel Rivals, and Apex Legends (even though it’s a battle royale). What sets my game apart is that characters don’t use traditional weapons like guns; instead, they wield musical instruments. Each character is unique, and I was thrilled to bring one of my characters into this mod.
The one I would’ve chosen for the mod was a woman who plays the saxophone. Since I can’t create a fully-fledged game with multiple characters, it would focus solely on her moving the payload while fending off attackers. However, the more I think about it, I realize this is a passion project for me, and I’d rather not rush it.
The second game mod idea is an ultimate laser tag experience where players swing, glide along walls, or even float to tag opponents and be the last ones standing. My sister inspired me to create this after I changed my original game idea. I researched maze designs to develop my concept, but laying out the level design became increasingly frustrating. I had to keep reminding myself that I was nowhere near an architect, so creating a solid floor plan was out of my reach. Just thinking about it only made my art block worse.
WEEK 3 - THE DECISION
OCT 6 - OCT 12
My final game mod idea was about a girl sent to a mansion to exterminate ghosts that fought back. This concept came to me while I was listening to music. Later, I realized it sounded familiar, and it hit me: “Luigi's Mansion." I started my research for a layout by exploring Pinterest, which was quite helpful. Before I began drawing my layout, I created a storyboard to illustrate how the game ' s UI features would be displayed seen in Figure 1 (Curry, 2024).
The introduction screen includes the title and options for play, collectibles, and settings. Upon clicking "Start," you will see a loading screen followed by an introductory sequence into the game.
Fig.1: Curry 2024. Storyboard of the mod “The Wraith Within”
OCT 6 - OCT 12
You will find yourself in front of an open-view mansion, equipped with a reloadable weapon, health, passive and active abilities, and an ultimate ability (ULT). Later, I need to add pause, defeat, and victory screens. I began to feel more enthusiastic about the game idea after creating the storyboard. I researched various films, including the liveaction version of Beauty and the Beast, and considered how the ballroom's interior could serve as an epic boss battle setting. I decided that this would be my main game concept, as the alternatives for the first game had become too ambitious, and while the second game was fitting, I struggled to develop a level design despite extensive research.
WEEK 4 - THE LAYOUT
This week, I started designing a draft layout for the level, as seen in Figure 2 (Curry, 2024). After finalizing the draft, I moved into Unity to begin greyboxing the layout. This process helped me translate the patterns from the draft into a clearer, more tangible design.
Fig.2: Curry 2024. Draft Layout of the Level “The Wraith Within”
Fig.4: Curry 2024. Side View of Level in Unity
Fig.3: Curry 2024. Top View of Level in Unity
As I mentioned in Week 3, the story revolves around a girl sent to a mysterious mansion to exterminate ghosts. The game opens in the grand foyer, where a phone sits on a table. As the scene begins, the phone rings. When you answer, a mysterious voice explains your mission: to enter every room in the mansion and defeat the ghosts within. The climax takes place in the final room, where you face a powerful boss monster.
WEEK 5 & 6 - A BIT OF HOPE
OCT 20 - NOV 2
I didn't do much for these weeks. I was struggling mainly with the user experience. The more I thought about the game, the more I didn’t see it being enjoyable. I asked for some advice from Terry and he gave me a really good insight into what I should do. He suggested I should make each room unique in the mansion; that's what got my brain to switch gears and develop how I could do that.
I began with the main entrance and grand foyer area seen in Figure 5 (Curry, 2024), drawing inspiration from games with a strong mansion vibe. The interior design from Doors from Roblox especially stood out to me, and I decided to create something similar in my own project seen in Figure 6 ( LSPLASH, 2022)
Lately, though, I’ve noticed I’ve been putting less effort into this module as I focus on finishing up GAM102. It’s leaving me in a tough spot. I still have an entire room to design, and I haven’t even started working on the monster yet.
Fig.6: LSPLASH 2022. Roblox game DOORS”
Fig.5: Curry 2024. Entrance Area for “The Wraith Within”
NOV 3 - NOV 16
As I’ve mentioned before, the boss battle will take place in the ballroom. I wanted to design the monster myself to ensure it matched the vibe I was aiming for. The play style for the fight draws inspiration from Cuphead, particularly its movement patterns and attack style.
To solidify my vision, I created a mood board outlining the monster’s features in Figure 7 (Curry, 2024). I didn’t want it to be outright horrific just eerie enough to leave an impression.
With the mood board in place, I started by designing the head and mask, inspired by the elegant patterns of a monarch butterfly. The body of the monster is stationary, fused to the wall, making it immobile. Its primary weapons are its hands, which launch attacks at the player. The idea of using the hands as the focal point of the fight came from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, specifically the Master Hand and Crazy Hand bosses see Figure 8 (Nintendo, 2018).
Fig. 7: Curry 2024. Mood Board for Final Boss
Comparing the first draft in Figure 9 (Curry, 2024) to the second in Figures 10 & 11 (Curry, 2024) I decided to darken the colors to better align with the ominous, red mansion vibe. This adjustment also helped the monster design blend more seamlessly with the atmosphere.
Fig. 8: Nintendo 2018 . Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Crazy and Master Hands
Fig. 9: Curry 2024. Final Boss First Draft
Fig. 10: Curry 2024. Final Boss Second Draft
WEEK 9 - ROUGH SPOT
NOV 17 - NOV 23
Week 9 was rough. For starters, I realized I wasn’t enjoying my project idea anymore. Designing different levels for each room was starting to drain me, and I felt stuck.
So, I decided to pivot. With a little time left, I figured I could start fresh. While browsing assets, one featuring animated robots caught my attention. It reminded me of an earlier concept I’d had—a space mod where players battle robots and ultimately face off against a boss. I decided to recycle the boss character from my original idea and build something new around it. I quickly got to work on the layout for the Captain’s Den, as seen in Figure 12 (Curry, 2024). I also began importing other assets to flesh out the environment. My vision was for the player to start in the ship’s dungeon, which has been overrun by aliens, and fight their way through to reclaim the ship.
Fig. 11: Curry 2024. Final Boss Second Draft. Outer Angle
WEEK 10 - 12 - FINAL PUSH NOV 23 - DEC 20
Well, well, well look who’s back at it, restarting their project yet again. With only three weeks left before submission, I have nothing to show. I desperately needed an idea and fast. While browsing the Unity Asset Store, I stumbled upon an intriguing asset—a bedroom where you play as a little boy, the size of an ant, battling nightmare toys. I was immediately hooked. After watching the demo video that came with it, my mind flooded with ideas. I downloaded the asset and got to work.
The concept I decided on was to create a children’s bedroom where you, the player, are a tiny hero tasked with fighting off bed bugs. The working title? “Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite.” Cute, right?
Fig. 12: Curry 2024. Rough Draft of Space Game
In Figure 13 (Curry, 2024), I’ve sketched out a rough draft of the room layout. I also wanted to add a unique introduction scene where you, as the mini-hero, speak to mice hiding in a small opening behind the big drawer.
Unfortunately, when I tried using ProBuilder's experimental Boolean feature to cut a hole in the wall, the geometry had too many subdivisions, and Unity crashed— without saving my work.
Panicking, I immediately reopened Unity, only to realize all my progress was gone. Later, I learned what I should have done: check the Assets folder for an unsaved data file before restarting the program. That initial setup had taken me four hours to complete, and losing it was devastating. But I surprised myself—I managed to redo the entire room layout in just an hour. In my newly remodeled room in Figure 14 (Curry, 2024), I added a second bed to create height and variation, as well as a cozy reading nook for added detail and atmosphere.
I wanted to include an introduction area to give players a clear sense of their mission. So, I created a classy mouse bar! Here, a mouse hostess explains that the bed bugs have returned, and it’s your job to eliminate them. In Figures 15 (Curry, 2024), you can also see a mouse playing the piano and another area set up for pool. These little details help bring the scene to life and add personality to the world.
Fig.13: Curry 2024. First Draft of DLTBBB Room
Fig.14: Curry 2024. Second Draft of DLTBBB Room. Top View
Fig.15: Curry 2024. First Draft of Mouse Bar for DLTBBB
I’ve updated the draft to include glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, adding a whimsical, childlike touch to the environment in Figure 16 (Curry, 2024).To enhance the festive vibe, I added a snow particle effect visible through the reading nook window, placed a Christmas tree in the room, and added a toy train circling the space. (The tree isn’t visible right now because it’s disabled in the Inspector, but it will appear in the Game View along with the particle effects.
Fig. 16: Curry 2024.Third Draft of DLTBBB
Fig. 17: Curry 2024. Third Draft of DLTBBB. Reading nook angle
Since the room is an open environment, I want the player to have the freedom to explore everywhere—even reaching high places. To achieve this, I planned to implement a grappling hook, jump pads, and a speed boost. However, the grappling hook gave me a lot of trouble. The player was set up with a character controller instead of a rigid body, and adding a pre-made rigid body component to the player caused conflicts. After struggling to work around this issue, I ultimately had to scrap the grappling hook, along with the speed boost. In the end, I decided to stick with the jump pad, which still allows the player to navigate spaces effectively.
Now, let’s talk about the actual enemy in the game. I initially found a beetle-like bug asset and imported it into Blender. I gave it some color seen in Figure 18 (Curry, 2024) and added a skeleton to prepare it for animation. Unfortunately, the skeleton and animations were incredibly wonky. Some meshes kept shifting out of place, which completely messed things up. After several failed attempts to animate it properly, I decided to scrap the asset altogether.
I had to find another bug asset to work with. Eventually, I found one that worked much better. After importing it, I started coloring the new bug in Figure 19 (Curry, 2024). This one had four arms, which presented a new challenge— pre-made animations from Mixamo wouldn’t work because the extra arms wouldn’t link up correctly. So, I added my own skeleton to the bug, and thankfully, it rigged beautifully.
Fig. 18: Curry 2024. Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug. Draft 1
Fig. 20: Curry 2024. Colored Concept Model of Host Mouse. Final Draft
Fig. 18: Curry 2024. Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug. Final Draft
Creating custom walk-and-attack animations for the bug gave me much more creative freedom. Once I had a solid walk animation, I armed the bug with three laser guns for its attack seen in Figure 21 (Curry, 2024). To streamline the process, I combined the walk and attack animations. This setup allowed the bug to patrol with its weapons in hand and seamlessly switch to attacking when the player entered its range.
When it came to creating the mouse, I found the perfect asset —it already had great colors applied, and all I needed to do was color the eyeballs. Simple enough, right? Well, not exactly.
Exporting the mouse into Unity was straightforward, but getting the colors to transfer properly? That was a nightmare. In Blender, the colors looked phenomenal, but they were applied as an attribute, not a material. This meant the colors wouldn’t carry over into Unity. Converting the attribute into a material texture proved to be much more challenging than I expected, and I’m definitely not at that level of Blender mastery yet.
Fig. 21: Curry 2024. Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug. Attached with Weapons
Even though I put a lot of effort into the mouse bar area— experimenting with baked lighting, which was surprisingly fun shown in Figures 22 & 23 (Curry,2024). I’ve ultimately decided not to use this area in the final project.
Fig. 22: Curry 2024. Scraped Second Draft of Mouse Bar for DLTBBB
Fig. 23: Curry 2024. Scraped Second Draft of Mouse Bar for DLTBBB
I started running into a ton of errors and issues with my commits. They wouldn’t push to the main Git repository, and on top of that, my game wouldn’t build properly. To fix it, I had lots of help from Paul, Terry, and Archie to create a new fork and set up a separate asset folder to house the game files.
The final preparations for finishing the game were now underway. After scrapping my earlier idea of using a grappling hook, I still wanted to give players a faster way to navigate certain areas without relying solely on the jump pad. The solution? A teleporter. In Figures 24 & 25 (Curry, 2024), you can see the two distinct pads I’ve implemented: the yellow glowing pad for the teleporter and the multicolored pad for the jump pad. Another addition was thee health pad which is green.
With that settled, I moved on to finalizing the game ’ s UI elements. The last major task was organizing the enemy. Transferring scripts from the premade enemies to my own custom prefabs was no small feat. It involved setting up patrol paths, defining walk points, and configuring the detection and attack modules. I even had to adjust how close the player needed to be for the bugs to start attacking.
The bugs are scattered throughout the environment, and while most share the same size and health, I added three larger bugs with more health to keep things interesting. You can spot one of the big ones in Figure 26 (Curry, 2024), perched ominously on the kid’s bed.
Fig. 24: Curry 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB. Ground Angle
Fig. 25: Curry 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB. Top Angle
Fig. 26: Curry 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB. Top Angle
REFLECTION
If I could go back and do things differently, I would’ve spent more time researching level design. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not exactly my favorite aspect of game development, but I’ve learned that even the things you ’ re not naturally drawn to can become manageable and even enjoyable with practice and patience.
Fig. 28: Curry 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB. Ground Angle Shooting Enemy
Fig. 27: Curry 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB. Ground Angle
Looking back, if I had come up with the concept for “Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite” earlier in the process, I think I’d feel even more proud of where I am now. The idea of a shrunken hero navigating an oversized environment has been incredibly fun to work on, and it’s sparked a lot of creativity I didn’t expect.
This project has taught me so much, and it’s one of the rare times I can genuinely say I’ve enjoyed the journey as much as the result. In fact, I can easily see myself continuing to refine and expand this game in my free time, exploring more creative possibilities for this tiny hero in a big, mysterious world.
There’s something endlessly fascinating about turning everyday objects into towering obstacles or hiding intricate stories within the details of a bedroom. It’s a perspective shift that feels fresh, exciting, and full of potential, and it’s definitely inspired me to keep pushing my limits as a game developer.
REFERENCES
Figure 1: Curry, G. 2024. Storyboard of the mod “The Wraith Within”. Personal Collections.
Figure 2: Curry, G. 2024. Draft Layout of the Level “The Wraith Within”. Personal Collection
Figure 3: Curry, G. 2024. Top View of Level in Unity. Personal Collection
Figure 4: Curry, G. 2024. Side View of Level in Unity. Personal Collection
Figure 5: Curry, G. 2024. Entrance Area for “The Wraith Within”. Personal Collection
Figure 6: LSPLASH .2018. DOORS. ROBLOX.
Figure 7: Curry, G. 2024. Mood Board for Final Boss. Personal Collection
Figure 8: NINTENDO. 2018. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. NINTENDO
Figure 9: Curry, G. 2024. Final Boss First Draft. Personal Collection
Figure 10: Curry, G. 2024. Final Boss Second Draft. Personal Collection
Figure 11: Curry, G. 2024. Final Boss Second Draft {Outer Angle}. Personal Collection
Figure 12: Curry, G. 2024. Rough Draft of Space Game. Personal Collection
Figure 13: Curry, G. 2024. First Draft of DLTBBB Room. Personal Collection
Figure 14: Curry, G. 2024. Second Draft of DLTBBB Room {Top View}. Personal Collection
Figure 15: Curry, G. 2024. First Draft of Mouse Bar for DLTBBB. Personal Collection
Figure 16: Curry, G. 2024. Third Draft of DLTBBB. Personal Collection
Figure 17: Curry, G. 2024. Third Draft of DLTBBB {Reading nook angle}. Personal Collection
Figure 18: Curry, G. 2024. Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug {Draft 1}. Personal Collection
Figure 19: Curry, G. 2024. Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug {Final Draft}. Personal CollectionFigure 19: Curry, G. 2024. Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug {Final Draft}. Personal Collection
Figure 20: Curry, G. 2024. Colored Concept Model of Host Mouse {Final Draft}. Personal Collection
Figure 21: Curry, G. 2024.Colored Concept Model of Bed Bug {Attached with Weapons}. Personal Collection
Figure 22: Curry, G. 2024. Scraped Second Draft of Mouse Bar for DLTBBB. Personal Collection
Figure 23: Curry, G. 2024. Scraped Second Draft of Mouse Bar for DLTBBB. Personal Collection
Figure 24: Curry, G. 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB {Ground Angle}. Personal Collection
Figure 25: Curry, G. 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB {Top Angle}. Personal Collection
Figure 26: Curry, G. 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB {Top Angle}. Personal Collection
Figure 27: Curry, G. 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB {Ground Angle}. Personal Collection
Figure 28: Curry, G. 2024. Final Draft of DLTBBB {Ground Angle Shooting Enemy}. Personal Collection
Galia Curry | Blog Entry 2024
