May 2025
- Genre: open-world, adventure, single-player.
- Type: Level Blockout
- Engine: Unreal Engine 5
- Tools: Unreal Engine Blueprints
- Role: Level Designer, Narrative Designer
- Development Time: 2 course weeks + 1 additional week for polishing based on the instructor's feedback
Paula: A Castilian Adventure is the final project of the CGMA Level Design course taught by Shane Canning. The goal of the final project was to put into practice everything learned during the course about Level Design and the Unreal Engine 5: image and spatial composition; visual language, affordances, landmarks and points of interest; identity and purpose of spaces; blockout and blueprints exercise.
In Paula: a Castilian adventure the player steps into the shoes of Paula, a young girl spending the summer at her grandparents’ house in a small Castilian town in Spain. In this open-world level, the player must complete a series of missions or tasks their grandmother has asked them to help with. And, to do so, the player must explore the town to fulfill these missions. Along the way, players will meet the town’s neighbors, who may occasionally offer side quests. They will also have opportunities to simply chat with townspeople or interact with friendly dogs and cats.
Taking inspiration from Alba: a wildlife adventure (2020, Ustwo Games), I tried to recreate the memories of childhood summers spent in my grandparents town. As in Alba, players can explore a quaint, bucolic villag to discover its secrets and all its nooks and crannies. Paula: a Castilian adventure offers a relaxing and joyful environment where players can unwind and enjoy the simple pleasures of being a kid for a day.
Hihglights
Low-pressure, exploration-first gameplay accessible to all ages and ideal for casual players. The level features exploration, dialogue-based interactions, and small quests designed to be intuitive for players.
Paula: a Castilian adventure is a non-violent experience. In this level there is no combat or violence; the experience is built around peaceful exploration.
The main goal in Paula: a Castilian adventure is the exploration of the small-town life with a wholesome, grounded feel.
The level aims to capture the charm of rural human connections and the importance of community and family care.
Another key aspect of the level is the rural charm of a small Castilian town, with its traditional architecture, warm earthy tones, and slower pace of life.
In Paula: A Castilian Adventure, players can simply take in the relaxing, peaceful landscapes of Spain’s interior — scenes full of life, warmth, and quiet wonder.
Through the eyes of Paula, this level evokes personal memories and everyday childhood with a heartfelt, nostalgic tone.
While exploring this level, observant players will discover many references to Spanish pop culture from the 1990s such as one of the famous cycling races in Spain (La Vuelta Ciclista) or TV shows playing on the televisor (Grand Prix del Verano).
Gameplay Overview and Design Techniques
For this level I designed from scratch a mission or quest log system that offers players fun and easy tasks to complete through main quests, side quests and hidden achievements.
This quest log system is based in Unreal's Structs or data structures, combined with Blueprints and Widget Blueprints.
The system allows players to track the missions and save the progress as they explore the level.
The level include areas that players can explore if they choose to, rewarding them with atmospheric views, unique interactions with the town's people and animals, and side quests to complete.
Despite having a mission log and a tracking system available for players to track the missions stages, players are encourage to explore the level and its corners in order to discover more quests and even hidden achievements.
The architectural design of the buildings forms natural leading lines that draw the player's attention to landmarks or point of interest.
There are several landmarks that serve as an orientation anchor and helps player to navigate intuitively through the level.
Paula: A Castilian Adventure offers richer social interactions with townsfolk, optional side quests, and the chance to interact with cute animals like dogs and cats, adding personality and life to the town. A level that feels alive and aims to catch the player’s eye and attention.
Pre-Production
I began this final assignment by exploring and brainstorming gameplay themes and directions. After considering a few different options, I was pretty sure that I wanted to try something different to the themes and genres we explored during the course and, since Alba: a wildlife adventure (2020, Ustwo Games) is one of my favourite games, I wanted to do an homage to it by using my own childhood in my grandparents village.
- Early Concept: with a clear direction on mind, I started to work on the documentation with a brief summary of the level and defining the game pillars, game mechanics, main references for the gameplay and aesthetic, and the key locations of the level. I was pretty sure that I wanted to incorporate a mission journal or mission log system to display the chores for the main character. So, in this ideation phase and early concepts I started to brainstorm the different missions that were divided into Main Quests (Grandma's chores) and the Side Quests (given by people in the village and other hidden achievements like interacting with dogs and cats).
- Reference Gathering: as mentioned before, the main inspiration for this level has been Alba: a wildlife adventure (2020, Ustwo Games), but other title such as Petit Island (2024, Xelo Games), Haven Park (2021, Bubblebird Studio) or A Short Hike (2019, Adam Robinson-Yu) has also served as reference in terms of aesthetic, gameplay and level design. These four games are considered cozy adventure games with an emphasis in exploration, emotional warmth, meaningful interactions, welcoming and nature-filled spaces, and with low-stakes gameplay.
- Map: the map of Paula: A Castilian Adventure is an adaptation of a real village in Castile, Spain. My main goal was to simplify the existing layout and make it more attractive and traversable, following core level design principles. The first step was selecting the streets I wanted to preserve from the original map, as well as the key buildings — always keeping the story and missions in mind. Then, I adapted these areas by creating better-connected paths and introducing verticality to avoid flat and monotonous terrain.
- Narrative: Paula: A Castilian Adventure is a cozy exploration game where you play as Paula, a 10-year-old girl spending the summer in her grandparents’ village — a quiet, sun-drenched town nestled in the heart of Castile, in the middle of Spain. With a long list of small errands from her grandma, Paula sets off to explore the winding streets, talk to friendly neighbors, and lend a helping hand. Whether it's picking figs, delivering letters, or simply playing with the local cats and dogs, every task brings a new opportunity to connect with the world around her. Inspired by the memories of childhood summers, Paula: A Castilian Adventure invites players to slow down and soak in the beauty of everyday life. It’s a heartfelt journey through family, community, and nostalgia — where joy is found in the little things.
- Character: none of the existing character blueprints I had were suitable for this level, so I searched for a free-to-use kid character on Sketchfab (source here). I then animated it using Mixamo to include the main animations needed for the level: jump, walk, and idle. To set up the character blueprint, I followed a tutorial to create a Third Person Character and Controller from scratch in Unreal Engine 5 (source here), using a Data Asset (Input Mapping Context) and a Character Blueprint.
- Mission Log: the next step of the pre-production phase was to put together the Mission or Quest Log System in Unreal Engine 5. To do so, I followed a complex tutorial based in Unreal's Structs or data structures, Enumerations for the different types of missions/quests, combined with Blueprints and Widget Blueprints (source here). The Structs serve as a Data Log for the quests details, objectives, and stages that we need to create the quest Data Table. Once this is all set up, I needed Blueprints for the Quest Givers, Pick Up Items or the Location Markers, as well as Widget Blueprints to display the interface of the mission system in screen.
- Beats: Given the nature of an open-world level, the beat graph of Paula: a Castilian adventure has a flat start with the tone and the mood that gradually and calmly rises as soon as Grandma gives Paula the tasks. From the warm start, we transition to a steady rise with the tasks and the exploration on the town, combined with joyful and nostalgic peak with the narrative beats and encounters scattered in the town. The different quests or missions, both Granma's tasks and the side quests, offer a variable emotional level with highs and lows throughout the game.
- Goals and Restrictions: the main goal of the level was to create an interesting space to traverse that feels alive. In order to help players with their navigation, the level also aims to fill the space with recognizable and memorable shapes so the player won't get lost and could easily mentally map the space as they explore the town. Another key goal was to adapt the real map of the town and translate it into a walkable and attractive space following the main principles of level design (readability, pacing and flow, purpose and a spatial composition with clear landmarks, silhouettes, negative space, and affordances).
Level Blockout
The first elements I modeled in this blockout were the main roads and streets, the riverbed, and the village’s key buildings: Paula’s house, the church, and the bakery.
The next steps in the blockout phase involved modeling the remaining elements of the level: the rest of the village houses, the bus station, the main square, the sheep farm, and the lake.
Finally, the polishing phase included implementing NPCs (both humans and animals, with splines and animations where needed), realistic physical barriers to define the playable area, as well as SFX, VFX, and NPC dialogue.
The main goal of this final phase was to give the village a realistic and lively feel, making it more immersive and appealing for the player.
Conclusions and Learnings
- This project guided me through the complete level design process — from initial brainstorming and rough layout to the final blockout. It was a hands-on experience in iteration, creative problem-solving, and designing with the player in mind.
- I think I was able to create a relatively polished level blockout that encourages wholesome and fun exploration in a lively feel and realistic envinronment within a warm atmosphere and nostalgic aesthetic.
- I was able to build from scratch both the Character and the Quest Log systems in Unreal Engine using Blueprints.
- Some physical barriers and constraints for the player movement don't feel realistic or natural and you can clearly see that it's intended by design.
- Due to the lack of time, some areas of the village are less polished or defined than others and they could have more details to be in line with the rest of the style. There are a few areas that may feel a bit boring and too long to traverse.
- Some Widgets and UI elements do not display properly after adapting the quest system into my level.
- I gained hands-on experience in using spatial composition, layout, and node networks to intuitively guide the player through the environment.
- I gained a lot of knowledge and experience in Unreal Engine Blueprints, as well as the logic that operates behind UE visual scripting system.
- I learned the value of having a clear and established visual language, specially during the first phases of the blockout.
If I could start over and do something different, I would probably reduce the scale of the level and focus on gameplay and player agency, maybe adding more mechanics available to the player (such as taking pictures and complete a journal of animals similarly to Alba: a wildlife adventure)