Final Project
A complete opening-level one-pager — map sketch, two item descriptions, a boss move summary, and an opening weak-guidance script
Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 35%
The brief#
Design a complete opening level for an original Souls-like: the first ten minutes a player would experience, argued as a single design document.
This is the semester’s four subsystems — level geography, combat, boss design, and weak guidance — applied to one original level rather than four separate exercises. Reuse what you’ve already built: the boss from Week 2 and its Blueprint, the shortcut sketch from Week 3, and the persona from your Loadout Pitch if it fits the level you’re designing.
What you submit#
A one-pager with four required parts:
- a hand-drawn or software map sketch of the opening level, with at least two shortcut loops
- two item descriptions from that level, written as unreliable testimony per Week 2’s standard
- a summary of one boss’s moves, including its phase transition and the sentence that justifies it narratively
- a short script for the level’s opening minute, showing how a player is guided toward the first room using only diegetic cues — light, a corpse, a distant landmark — with no on-screen objective text
Alongside the one-pager, a 200-word reflection: the one part you rewrote after noticing it didn’t actually match the other three, and what the mismatch was. Assembling four subsystems into one document is exactly where a level stops arguing one thing and starts arguing four — the reflection is where you show you caught that before a reader had to.
Where this goes next#
Nowhere — this is the semester’s argument, assembled. It’s presented and peer-reviewed at the Week 12 bonfire crit alongside your Death Notes portfolio.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- all four required parts are present and reference the same original level, boss and setting
- the map sketch includes at least two shortcut loops, per Week 3's standard
- the boss move summary includes a phase transition with its narrative justification, per Week 5's standard
- the opening script guides the player using diegetic cues only — no on-screen objective text or quest arrow
Reflection
Name the one part of the one-pager you rewrote after noticing it didn't actually match the other three, and what the mismatch was. (200 words.)
How it is marked
Judged as a single design document, not four separate pieces. The four parts have to argue the same thing about your level — a map sketch that contradicts its own item descriptions, or a boss with no relationship to the opening script, reads as four assignments stapled together rather than one opening level.
| Tier | Descriptor |
|---|---|
| Full-health clear | Pull any one part out and it still names a detail — a setting, the boss's identity, a specific hazard — that at least one other part also depends on. The four parts couldn't be reshuffled onto a different level without rewriting them. |
| Clean kill | The four parts agree, but only at the level of genre convention — nothing beyond "this is a Souls-like level" ties them together; no shared proper noun or concrete detail does the connecting work. |
| Died once, adapted | Three of the four parts cohere; one reads as written for a different level — a boss with no relationship to the opening script, or an item description that doesn't fit the sketched space. |
| You died | Four disconnected pieces that each satisfy their own spec line in isolation but do not describe the same level. |