DESCENSION
Winner of Best 2nd Year Game Falmouth Games EXPO 2025
Descension is a 2.5D parkour platformer created in Unreal Engine focused on fast and fluid movement. As a Wizard’s apprentice, the player must race through a magical forest during the day, only to have to escape through the same levels in reverse when night falls.
Responsibilities for the project included:
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Design of the Character Controller and Enemies
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In Engine Enemy Prototyping and Implementation
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Level Designer for Levels 1 and 3. (Initial Designs, Greyboxing, Polish)
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Additional Level Design for all Night time levels. (Enemy Placement Layout Polish)
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Additional Level Design for all Levels (Collectables Placement)
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All Gameplay Design Documentation
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Camera Set Up
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Quality Assurance and Playtesting
This was developed over the course of a year as part of a larger team of programmers, artists, and designers.
GAMEPLAY DESIGN
All mechanics were designed in documentation form first, mostly using a design on a grid as seen here.
Fluidity and control were prioritised from the get go, considering features such as jump buffering, coyote time and jump variability based on how long the player presses the input.
After the initial prototype was made, a second wave of designs were drawn up. These are the ones featuring a player model. These focused less on the minutia and more on the feel, as this was about refining the controller based on playtesting and player feedback.
This second pass, was built in close collaboration with our programmer, and our other designer in order to ensure everything was set up properly, and worked with the planned style of level design.
Although these were effective documents, they were not perfect, and I used the feedback from this, to improve for my next project Smash Hammer.
The enemies were designed around the same time as the player character in order to ensure their mechanics worked well together. This document did not become the final version of the enemies as they evolved over time to better suit the game's needs, based on the final level design, player feedback and based on considerations for scope.
Making this in tandem with the player meant that this document still influenced other elements of design, such as the player's crouch here, leading to the implementation of a slide move, and the darkness mechanic listed here went on to become the main chaser monster enemy.
The gallery below contains more early design documentation for the character controller.
We decided early on that variable jump height was essential to giving players a satisfying amount of control over their movement. Whilst not a mechanic explicitly tutorialised, for many gamers it is muscle memory from other titles.
Implementing "coyote time was deemed essential right from the early concepting stage, as it massively improves accessibility by accounting for players with increased reaction time, and for any input lag.
One of the more complicated mechanics introduced was the wall run, which made it in entirely as described, partly because all outcomes were considered in the document here.
We decided early on that variable jump height was essential to giving players a satisfying amount of control over their movement. Whilst not a mechanic explicitly tutorialised, for many gamers it is muscle memory from other titles.
LEVEL DESIGN
I was also one of the designers responsible for level design, creating most of Level 1 and 3, handling enemy placement during the night levels, handling camera positioning, some of the tutorial dialogue, and making small tweaks to Level 2 and the tutorial.
Level Design for this project was a unique process as all of the levels were designed to be played in both directions, so a huge amount of testing and iteration was required.
Although Design Documentation was used for initial design conceptualisation, and later for enemy placement, it was not used as effectively as it could've been, something I improved upon for my next big project Smash Hammer.
The gallery below contains some of the level design documentation.
Different coloured lines, indicate how routes break off and rejoin with each other.
Different coloured lines, indicate how routes break off and rejoin with each other.
![Level 1 Night Time Enemy Plan [Complete Image]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c9382f_df34a97535b941aaac6971b4053a9b1f~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_117,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/c9382f_df34a97535b941aaac6971b4053a9b1f~mv2.png)
Enemies have been sketched atop screenshots of the levels with annotated arrows and sight beams to show functionality.
Different coloured lines, indicate how routes break off and rejoin with each other.
The videos below show how the game changed over the course of development.
GALLERY
