The Last Bastion is a single-player 3D survival mobile game featuring combat, crafting and base building that was developed as a group assignment from May 2021 - August 2021.
The game loop consist of a day & night cycle where in the daytime, players can explore, loot resources, build bases and/or infiltrate enemy sectors. Once comes nightfall, players will face multiple waves of enemies and has to defend their base until first light.
I was the Level Designer and UI/UX designer for this project.
The game can be downloaded and played here:
Below are the rough mockups of the (4) enemy sectors and placement of resources & enemy sectors that I came up with while developing the game.
Armoury Sector
Barrack Sector
Medical Sector
Turret v1.0 Sector
Turret v2.0 Sector
Resources & Sectors Placement in Game World
Legend
Green = player start
Big White = cluster of enemies
Small White = solo enemy
Blue = 4-5 rubbles
Pink = 4-5 iron ores
Purple = 2-4 scifium
Yellow = cluster of buildings that cant be entered
Orange = cluster of buildings that can be entered
Bright red = enemy sectors
Dark red = Barrack sector (final mission)
There was some confusion from the artist on some areas as the mockup only made sense to me and it was very messy. Therefore, the improvements I would make now if I were to re-developed the game is to:
Use the same font colours as the objects in the mockup.
Use the same colour for the same objects in different mockups.
Split each individual rooms into different pngs.
Include a legend for the icons/objects instead of using words.
Give detailed descriptions of the objects of different sizes.
Label different floors properly or in different pngs.
Separate mockup of important areas in the sectors and the overall mockup.
Make use of smaller/limited space rather than making the sectors larger to accommodate more obstacles.
Have a few variation of enemy paths rather than adding more enemies.
Make both aggressive and stealth entryways more enticing with different rewards to accommodate to different playstyles.
Besides the level design of the game, there were other difficulties that were faced as a team, the main issue being that we only had (1) artist. It meant that as the UI/UX designer for the game, I had to contribute in making UIs as there was too much workload on the artist. Below are the UI mockups for the game.
Day Cycle UI
Harvest Mode UI
Building Mode UI
Combat Mode UI
Inventory UI
Night Cycle UI
Paused Menu UI
Loading UI
Settings Menu UI
Load Profile Menu UI
Unfortunately, the UI placement couldn't be implemented properly due to time constraint and some internal bugs and the team decided to only place the combat UI on display at all times.
However, there are improvements that I found after looking back at the game. When combat was first implemented into the game, I decided to follow the controls mapping of the popular mobile FPS game, PUBG Mobile but during some public playtest sessions, most testers do not use crawl, squat or jump during combat. This is also true for tilt left and right but the programmers had no time to remove it from the final build.
In hindsight, I would remove all the combat UIs in other modes such as when player is building and crafting as there is no use for it. I would also remove backstab melee UI as the implementation of the wandering enemies path is based on radius detection, so backstabbing melee will never be of any use, but obviously as enemies were implemented late into the development as our main focus was on crafting and base building, we wouldn't have known this beforehand.
The opacity of clicked buttons and players in different modes should also be of lower opacity to avoid players thinking that the triple arrow icon is another mode.
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