Mountain A scent

Mountain Ascent tells the story of an adventurer in pursuit of a parent's lost treasure. Players ascend the mountain, collect treasure, and defeat enemies.

Developed at the end of the CGMA Level Design Workshop, this level emphasizes strong visual waypoints, deliberate sequence and pacing, careful placement of rewards and encounters, and expressive shape language.

The workshop provided a uniform prompt and narrative beats, from which we developed our individual levels as we saw fit - producing a unique pitch while remaining within the assigned parameters as an exercise in restraint and following direction.

1. Explore

2. Valve, then Small Combat

3. Explore

4. Valve, then Big Combat

5. Find the Treasure

"Many years ago, the cowboy's mother was a prospector, and struck it rich. Unfortunately, her partner betrayed her and stole all the gold for himself. The cowboy's mom tracked him down, but he died before she could find out where he stowed all the gold. Recently, the cowboy happened upon a some clues about the gold's location. But his sworn enemy overheard his plans to find it, and has gotten here first, with an army of desperados. They'll use any means necessary to keep the cowboy from his treasure."

In addition to the blockmesh sequence, taking the level to completion involved a variety of technical implementations to reach full playablity.

These included the careful placement of:

invisible collision
spawn points
trigger regions
enemy pathing
collectibles
respawn points
death zones