Relapse
Outlandish Development
Overview
Relapse was created in Unity by Outlandish Development, a team of 15 game designers. It is a first person shooter game with ability-based combat, fast-paced movement, shops, and a comic book aesthetic. The player gains new abilities through the use of drugs as they slowly discover the harsh consequences of attaining them. Players who make poor decisions throughout the game will be forced to restart the cycle.
Interior Level Design
The interior spaces are in a broken down apartment that is overrun with monsters and hallucinations. The walls are decorated with distressed textures and decals as a reflection of the character's mental state. The hallways are filled with garbage, debris, and broken furniture to suggest that the place has been ransacked and abandoned. Lights outside of important doors shine brighter, and exit signs lead the way forward. This is where players meet dealers and have the choice to purchase abilities and weapons.
Exterior Level Design
Exterior levels focus on movement and combat. This mostly takes place on the rooftops of the inner city. These levels allow the player to wall-run on billboards, jump across the tops of surveillance drones, slide down ramps, and fight back against the monsters. These levels consist of traversal zones and combat zones with a big emphasis on verticality. The platforming gets more complex as the game progresses. These challenges include moving obstacles, larger gaps, destructible objects, and slides that require precise timing to preserve momentum.
Contributions
My primary role on this project was Level Designer, but I have also worked on the audio design, VFX, and animations. I have written and helped record several original songs for the game and balanced the audio levels between music and SFX. I spent a lot of time communicating with play testers to revise my levels so that they are satisfying to complete. I found that creating obstacles that appear more difficult than they are makes the player feel accomplished without getting frustrated.
Level Breakdown
Phase 1: High-Speed Entry & Warehouse Arena
- Dynamic Intro: The player drops onto an angled rooftop, forcing a high-speed slide that launches them toward a narrow path.
- Arena Combat: Bouncing off a security drone, the player crashes through a warehouse window into the first major combat arena.
- Puzzle & Checkpoint: After defeating the enemies, the player loots a keycard to hijack a crane. By repositioning the crane arm, they create a bridge to the warehouse roof, triggering the first checkpoint.
Phase 2: Vertical Traversal & Rooftop Combat
- Movement Challenge: The player navigates the skyline by chaining jumps and wall-runs across neighboring buildings and billboards.
- Multi-Tiered Arena: The second combat zone sprawls across three distinct rooftops. The player must utilize their full kit to survive until a security drone moves into position, providing a jump point to nearby scaffolding.
Phase 3: Precision Platforming & Narrative Climax
- Timed Traversal: The pacing shifts to precision timing. The player must carefully time their jumps across moving drones and wall-run along a series of rotating billboards before the path shifts out of alignment.
- The Ambush: After a brief platforming section, a sudden enemy ambush forces the player to desperately slide under a doorway to safety.
- Hallucinatory Climax: The final interior space slopes sharply downward, forcing a continuous slide. The building’s geometry inverts to appear upside down as the player begins to hallucinate, fading to white to simulate the verge of an overdose.
Additional Game Mode: Speedrun
To increase replayability, I introduced a dedicated Speedrun mode where players can test their mechanical mastery and compete for the fastest time.
Challenging Obstacle Course: Designed specifically to push the player's movement skills to their absolute limits.
High Skill Ceiling: The level features strategically placed hidden shortcuts and advanced routing options that reward exploration and practice.
Massive Time Optimization: By mastering the optimal path and executing advanced strategies, players can drastically cut their completion time from a baseline of 3 minutes down to a blisteringly fast 45 seconds.
Iteration
The image above shows an early iteration of the first level that I designed for Relapse. It features multiple floors of dark, maze-like hallways filled with monsters and jump scares around every corner. This level was completely scrapped after playtesting. The reason for this change was that there was a disconnect between the mechanics and the genre. The mechanics felt like an action shooter, while the level felt like it was out of a survival horror game. Future levels were made to be more open and movement-focused, making interior sections brief and dense with narrative.
