So, that happened! We won the Procedural Magicians category for the Epic MegaJam! Woohoo!

Houdini has been our content creation tool of choice for years and so we were at the ready to get some procedural levels cooking. An important thing to note is that we didn’t generate the level layouts procedurally. Controllability and directability is a key aspect for our workflows, in general.

We would typically want to have very specific control over the layout of the level (we want to direct the layout or floorplan) so that we can fine tune the size, layout and level progression instead of being at the mercy of a seed value. But we do want Houdini to do all the heavy lifting and place all our geometry instances everywhere (walls, windows, doors, floor tiles, grass, trees, flowers). Who has time to do that anyway?

Here’s a preview of constructing a level layout for Untethered using Houdini:

The whole level layout (authored in Houdini) would be bundled into an HDA and instanced in Unreal Engine using the Houdini Engine plugin for Unreal. After making layout changes in Houdini all we needed to do was save the HDA and recook it in Unreal, giving us a massive increase in the number of iterations that we could achieve with level layouts, trying out different looks, and even adding a whole garden to all our levels later during the jam.

Once we were happy with the general layout and locked it down, we would manually populate the level with props and lights to have maximum artistic control over the look and feel (from both a visual and gameplay perspective).

Experimenting with a power pose for our Grim Reaper when use the Tether ability:

Glimpse

Testing out the Scythe Weapon Trail:

For more info, check out our official page for Untethered HERE

That’s it for now. If you’d like us to do a deep dive on anything specific, let us know!