"In Infernal Cleaner you play as hell's resident cleaner, doomed to powerwash blood off the walls of hell for all eternity."
As part of a team of four, I have been working as an environment artist, level designer, and writer on Infernal Cleaner since mid-2024.
As part of a team of four, I have been working as an environment artist, level designer, and writer on Infernal Cleaner since mid-2024.
In late 2024 we assembled a vertical slice of the game to begin showing at events to get feedback and grow audience interest.
As the level designer and writer on the game, I held the responsibility for grounding the player in the hell environment. In the vertical slice version of the game, this meant giving players a light taste of the game's larger narrative without overdoing it for the short experience. Below is an example of some of the hidden notes that the player can pickup and read in the dungeon level.
Before the player is explicitly told that they are in hell, there are many environmental clues like pentagram's made of blood, fiery red lighting and imposing shapes like spikes and chains that suggest as much to the player.
EARLY PROTOTYPE
The initial prototype environment had a much lower poly and less moody style. Looking back at game play of the prototype demonstrates how much the new blood materials and environment help set the theme of the game.
LEVEL DESIGN
After protoyping, our first concepts and blockouts for the vertical slice (seen below) for the environment involved more verticality and a ice-themed hellscape. We changed to a smaller dungeon style environment for the first level (read about it here) to have more control over the tutorialisation stage and to keep it in scope for the small team working on it.
After the vertical slice, I adopted a more traditional ProBuilder greybox design method for blocking out early level concepts. Using primitive shapes I created and playtested an office-themed level, which acts as a level with a tonal shift midway through the game. Initially it consisted of ProBuilder shapes, some early office lighting and tests of Blood layout.
I wanted to make the Office-hell more chaotic and hell like. So I put a heavier focus on lighting and breaking apart the level's shapes, and putting the level on a tilt (as if an evil giant had picked up the office and shaken it). This also created the opportunity to add platforming elements like jumping on the hanging office lights. I also began baking lighting and refining the post-process volumes to set the mood.
