This Town Ain’ t Big Enough
Ry MENDENHALL
Level Design
This Town Ain’ t Big Enough
“ This Town Ain’ t Big Enough” is a story about two former actors, known for their glory days in Wild Space Frontier movies, who abruptly ended their friendship over a woman they both loved. I wanted to tell this story in a way that was both humorous and emotional by channeling movies from my childhood starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, as well as grumpy old men I was raised around. Their language is crass, yet funny, while the men are secretly more thoughtful and emotional than they let on from their stoic demeanors.
I wanted the gameplay to be something different from what the player normally encounters in the game, and I ultimately landed on utilizing a stealth-style mechanic that forewent the game’ s built-in system in favor of a more localized roomby-room approach. This is how I landed on the BudBot, security bots that patrol Casa de Bud in the abandoned movie set town of Flyfire.
Utilizing a custom script set to activate when the player is within specific rooms, BudBots will ignore the player until they view them as a threat. At that time, they will charge at the player to attack. If the player doesn’ t quickly run away, they will be thrust back to the foyer of the house— a mansion inspired by the castle maze sections of various Legend of Zelda titles.
This project was beneficial to me because it helped me to further develop my technical design skills, while also allowing me to flex my storytelling muscles. I feel like this will also be beneficial to the industry by showing that there are different ways to approach quests and their mechanics, while maintaining the themes and mechanics of their root games.
40 LEVEL DESIGN