Yeongdo Lighthouse
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Game: Ground Zero
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Genre: Third Person (Fixed Perspective) Survival Horror
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Type: Singleplayer
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Created as Lead Level Designer at Malformation Games
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Available on: Steam, PS5, XBOX Series X|S
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Level Development Time: 2 months
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Engine: Unreal Engine 5
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Team Size: between 6-10
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Length: about 30 minutes
Yeongdo Lighthouse is the primary location featured in Chapter 4 of Ground Zero's main story. It is a landmark lighthouse in the Taejongdae resort area just outside of Busan.
After leaving Gamcheon Village, Seo-Yeon continues toward the lighthouse in hopes of finding vital clues about what started the disaster.
I chose to feature this level because it showcases my skill in scene composition, environmental storytelling, pacing, and worldbuilding for large interconnected areas.
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Production
Reaching Yeongdo Lighthouse is one of the first major objectives of the story of Ground Zero, with the player being instructed to do so from the very onset of the game. It then remains the most important objective for the next 4 chapters.
At the very beginning of the project's development, the Game Director described his vision for the scene: a lighthouse in the distance sitting atop a hill that acts as the primary destination for the player. I was shown an initial concept art of the scene, which influenced the very first areas of the game.
From a design perspective, I reasoned that one of the most effective ways to help the lighthouse remain relevant was to keep it visible as much as possible. If the player always sees it, they get a constant reminder of their final objective. For inspiration, I looked to one of my favorite games, Half-Life 2. In HL2, a large building called the Citadel towers over the landscape and is so tall that it can be seen from most levels in the game. It remains an enigma for the entire game, with the player only reaching it at the very end. This facilitates a fantastic build up and pay off when its finally reached, and I knew I wanted to do the same thing with the lighthouse in Ground Zero.
I designed the first 4 chapters of the game around the lighthouse, tailoring the landscape and relative location of the chapter areas so that the lighthouse would always be visible from most outdoor sections. This would not only serve to thematically tie the beginning parts of the game together, but also provide a similar ramp up as the Citadel from HL2, since the player would slowly make their way closer and closer over time. By the time they reached the top of the lighthouse, I wanted to give the player a massive payoff in being able to see every area they had been to at that point, while also introducing their next major story objective.
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Design
References
Real life photo of Yeongdo Lighthouse, located in Taejgongdae Park, Busan, South Korea
The Citadel in Half-Life 2, towering over the land.
A core inspiration for the Lighthouse's framing
Bolle-gil Coastal Walkway, a local tourist attraction in the Busan region
Early concept art for the beach with the lighthouse seen in the distance, drawn by Kylin Huang
Topdown
Initial topdown showing how the first few areas of the game are positioned with direct line of sight to the lighthouse.
Blockout
Early terrain of chapters 1-3 with lighthouse visible in the background. This was made almost at the very start of the game's development, to serve as a central focal point for the levels built around it
Bolle-gil Walkway
Early geometry and lighting for the lighthouse / hotel pool area
A very early walkthrough of the blockout of the areas connecting chapters 1-4.
This is to give an idea of the scope of the region I constructed around the lighthouse
Final Result
View of the Lighthouse in the distance
Another view of the lighthouse in the distance from a later chapter.
At this point, the player has gotten a lot closer
Bolle-gil Coastal Walkway, just under the lighthouse
A fateful celebration
The payoff - a view from the lighthouse of every area in chapters 1-4 as well as unreachable areas of the Gamcheon Village
I want to give a huge thanks to my teammate Sixten Augustsson (Environment & Hard Surface Art), for his amazing contributions to the above areas. Sixten worked with me to make all of the custom art for the Bolle-gil path and hotel pool areas.
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Level Flow
1. Traverse the Bolle-gil Coastal Walkway
2. Fight through the hotel pool area
3. Enter the hotel
4. Get to the 6th floor
5. Enter the lighthouse and climb to the top
6. Obtain the black box and report to HQ
7. Return to the bottom and ride the tram
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Gameplay
Scene Composition & Worldbuilding
Since Ground Zero is a fixed perspective game, I have to manually place the cameras that the player views the world through. This chapter was a great opportunity to use unique camera angles to show off the sheer scale and detail of the environment.
Much of this was facilitated by the layout (see topdown above) and position of the areas relative to the lighthouse, allowing for large vistas that could be shown off in the background.
Many retro-style games opt for more simplistic environments with a low draw distance. I wanted to have extremely detailed levels with large vistas and pretty visuals because I believed that they would help Ground Zero stand apart from its competitors.
After reaching the top of the lighthouse, all of the areas the player has been through are presented as one massive vista. This is my favorite camera angle in the game.
Dynamic Layout
One of the central combat encounters in this level is an optional boss fight against the Dog Cluster, a boss that is seen in an earlier chapter of the game.
When he's first encountered, it's possible to leave the arena early and skip the fight entirely. However, by doing that, the player is assigned a state that, upon entering the hotel pool, causes 2 Dog Clusters to appear at the same time.
The level layout also changes depending on whether or not the player will engage in the optional boss fight. At a specific area of the hotel pool, the player must climb up a stack of boxes to reach a high ledge. This high ledge unfortunately also prevents the boss from pathing up and down, allowing players to cheese the fight.
To remedy this, I created level Blueprint logic that spawns in extra crates and a ramp, allowing the boss to properly path up and down the ledge.
This is just one of many examples of moments in Ground Zero where the player is left free to experiment with different strategies, and the game actually takes note of those choices and adapts to them in specific ways.
The Dog Cluster reappears here if he is skipped in an earlier chapter
When conditions are met to spawn the boss, this ramp appears to allow the boss to path up and down the ledge
Environmental Storytelling
Yeongdo Lighthouse and most of chapter 4 is very heavy on environmental storytelling and lore.
One of my favorite locations in the level to work on was the hotel pool area. In this area, a birthday party can be found that is full of dead participants, rotting food, overturned chairs, and unopened gifts. The sight of all of the chaos is meant to evoke a feeling of desolation and sadness, as all of the people who were at this party were partaking in a happy moment before disaster struck.
I worked together closely with our Environment Artist and Game Director to create custom assets for the scene as well as frame the camera angles to highlight them.
There are also plenty of custom texts that I wrote that appear when the player interacts with the environment, giving the main character's immediate thoughts on the destruction, as well as diaries and written notes that can be found that detail the experiences of the people there.
Various rotting food helps showcase the absolute chaos and destruction of the scene
A bar patron's grisly end
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Video Walkthrough
Level begins at 1:45:00 and is continued in the below video