Seb Axel - Witcher 3 Mod Showcase

See a full playthrough with some design chat below:

My objective with this mod was to create 1, fully featured quest that brings a dungeon crawling escue feel to the Witcher 3.

I first started out in 2d and made a rough layout for what I was thinking for the main dungeon, one thing I really wanted to do here was ensure there was a balance of different types of gameplay for the player, exploration, traps and combat encounters. I wanted to capture that feeling of Sen's Fortress from Dark Souls 1.

Stars represent encounters, T for traps and C for treasure chests

The next thing I did was jump into engine and just get a quick rough idea of what I was looking for, my aim here wasnt to spend any significant time, just to get the layout and basic scripts working

After this I started to build out the space a little more and ran into 2 main problems. Firstly there just seemed to be too many encounters, the weighting just didnt quite feel right, in the screen shot below I found a location where you would be able to spot 3 seperate encounters that would be directly back to back. This lead me to my second problem.

Probably due to firstly designing on paper but the level was far too flat and allowed the player to see too much, as such the level felt interesting to traverse and worse made it quite easy to get lost. To fix these I went back to the original 2d design and made some updates to iterate and improve the feel of the level

A new underground section was added and the large 2 lower rooms were redesigned to be 1 space with some debris blocking the players path but allowing them to see ahead. I used the stairs up to the boss to block vision and increase the apnticipation as to what might be up there

On a 3rd iteration I really wanted to push the verticality even more and make the space more interesting to traverse. Firstly I added a spiral staircase to the start of the level to make it feel like a descent down into a lair.

I then in the center room felt like the treasure room felt a bit redundant as it was so obvious to the player, so I made this one big room and dropped the treasure down to take it out of the player sight until they explore, in addition I used this extra space to introduce some spike traps in a very safe enviroment that would be expanded on later

I learned a lot from this project, and ill proably be following up this quest with a second when I have the time. I think I mostly suceeded my objective but id like to try making a more dense and claustrophobic level next as this was actually much more open than my original intention.

If you wish to contact me please use the form below or email me at seb.axel@outlook.com