Non-Euclidian Research

Level Designer and Integration

Summary

This project’s point was to make research on a subject or mechanic and create it in Unreal Engine. I made research about non-Euclidian worlds and it really fascinated me how they can be accomplished in a game. One of the most popular non-Euclidian mechanics are portals.

A playthrough of the portal level

Portal Integrations

I first followed a tutorial to create a portal with the right illusion, but it hasn’t satisfied me since it was extremely hard coded. So my research continued to learn how to code a portal with the illusion of passing through. The second one was much better and enabled me to have a nice effect around it and to assign which portals would be linked together.

Research

I wasn’t sure at first what I wanted to make with the portals I created. The point of this research was to create a mix of illusions and puzzles in the level. Therefore, I went to look at playthroughs of non-Euclidian games like Portal 2, Rouge Noir, Fragments of Euclid and Antichamber. I noted all the unique ways portals and illusions were used to create levels and inspired myself to make mine.

Level Design

Before jumping into Unreal Engine, I made a 2D plan of what I intended to make with the portals. It can be confusing with the amounts of portals present, but the one linked together have the same color and I decided to make a top view and a 3/4 view to help understand myself and others as well. While recreating the level in Unreal, I realized that having two portals back to back created a strange problem that would bring you to the wrong room, so to fix this, I used a dot product to make sure the player is facing the right portal and enters the correct room.

A video showing a bug I had having two portals back to back
The final result of the blocking