Lady Umbrella

FEBRUARY 2025 – OCTOBER 2025

Lady Umbrella is a 3D action-adventure shooter in which the player takes on the role of special agent Francesca De Angelis, who has been betrayed and framed by her partner. Now she must clear her name and defeat the mafia using her signature weapon: a multifunctional umbrella which acts both as a shotgun (when closed) and as a shield (when opened).

I worked as Game Designer, Level Designer and Combat Designer on this game as my Master’s Degree Final Project. You can check all my contributions below.

My Contributions

Level Design

Contributed in the first approach of the character and environment metrics, such as distances (jumps, death falls) and cover measures.
Documented the LDD of the first level, which includes:
- Level setting and restrictions
- Intrinsic goals.
- Extrinsic goals.
- Moodboard.
- The dirty and clean layouts of the level.
- A flowchart.
- A beatchart defining the pacing.
- List of assets, so the art team could have a general idea of what was needed.
Dirty and Clean Blockout of Level 1.
Helped the art team dress Level 1.

AI Design

Designed and documented:

The Arena Manager, responsible for handling enemies in a bigger scale to ensure the combat is fair and fun, by managing parameters such as:
- Enemy Spawn Points and data.
- The Coordination System which limits how many entities can be performing offensive actions.
- The Arena Zones, which contain information about all the covers placed inside them.
The Mafia Goon enemy traits, states and behaviour.
Combat events, such as reinforcement spawns.
General enemy death and effects information.

Game Design

Designed and documented:

The Controls of the 3C’s, which includes:
- Defining all the character actions and states, and which ones disabled the others.
- Keyboard control scheme.
- First iterations of the controller control scheme.
Save System, with all the information the game should keep track of.
Load System, with the different ways to load the game (new game, continue and chapter select).
All the Steam Achievements, which mainly focused on encouraging the use of all the combat mechanics.

Localisation & QA

Catalan localisation of :
- All menus.
- All UI elements, such as tutorial hints and workbench’s descriptions.
- All the voicelines found in both cutscenes and regular gameplay.
Game Testing and bug report using a template made by the programmers.

In-Depth Look at Chapter 1's Level Design

Setting, Restrictions & Goals

Chapter 1 (Mafia City Escape) takes place right after the initial cutscene, in which Francesca gets betrayed by her partner and escapes the meeting.

The setting is the italian city streets during sunset, with Francesca having to shoot her way through the different locations of this city.

So, as the first level of the game, the restrictions were the following:

Takes place in the italian streets at sunset.
Must teach all the basic mechanics to the player: basic movement, jumping, aiming, shooting, shielding…
Must be more linear with only a couple “secret areas”, as the upgrade pieces are not introduced until the second level.
Only introduces the first type of enemies (mafia goons).
The combat arenas must have fewer enemies, with 2-3 enemies max (excluding reinforcements).
Can’t implement gadget puzzles as they are not unlocked until later levels.

With these restrictions, I thought the right approach was to combine lower paced platforming sections with higher paced spikes of action provided by single enemy encounters and unique arenas.

The intrinsic goals of the level were the following:

Teaching the player all the previously mentioned base mechanics.
Advance the story, by introducing one objective at the start of the level (escaping the mafia) and then another one at the end: reaching a macro landmark (a giant art gallery).
To introduce a new enemy type (the mafia goon) and then adding a new mechanic (the grenades) to this enemy towards the end of the level.

On the other hand, the extrinsic goals were the following:

Teaching the player skills such as rapid thinking and decision-making in combat.
To amuse the player.

Layout, Flowchart & Beatchart Evolution

Due to the level getting iterated many times, the layout, flowchart and beatchart have also been modified.

At the beginning, the Avenue and the Final Arena in front of the Art Gallery were the only combat arenas. The Central Plaza was not conceptualized yet. Overall the level was even more linear and had too many long and empty straight streets.

As the level kept getting iterated, more sections were introduced and some others got expanded on. At one point there were 11 sections but some of them had to be cut as the level was too long. The Critical and Gold Path in this level have remained similar due to the linearity and restrictions to add more branching and optional zones.

The beatchart also changed as each section got iterated, with sections 5 and 11 (Plaza Arena and Final Arena) being the ones with the highest intensity.

As seen in the Layout, the Flowchart confirms the linearity of the level. It visualizes the level progression structure, indicating which mechanics are mostly used in each section.

The Blockout Journey

The Blockout was the most time consuming and rewarding task. Translating your idea from a 2D layout to a 3D playable space inside the engine is no easy task. When playing the level, some things like the scale or the width of the streets might seem off even if they seemed correct on paper.

This phase is all about iterating, deleting or reworking what felt off to rebuild something better, closer to the desired experience.

On the first iterations everything felt too narrow. Everything got scaled up, as once we entered the dressing stage there should be enough room to add some paviments, street lights, decorative props…

All the sections got major reworks, since there were even some mechanics like falling platforms which did not make the cut.

In these pictures you can see all the process from the early Dirty Blockout until the final gold version of most of the sections of the first level.

In-Depth Look at the AI Design

The Arena Manager

The Arena Manager is responsible for handling enemies in a bigger scale to ensure the combat is fair and fun, by managing parameters such as:

Enemy Spawn Points which contain information such as the spawn location, type of enemy and weapon used.

The Coordination System is responsible to limit how many entities can be performing offensive actions at a time, as well as to determine who are the most important actors that should be performing these actions. In conclusion, this part of the Arena Manager is needed to balance the fights and make sure it feels fair.
- There is a maximum of X tokens in fights with more than one enemy. Only the enemies with a token can perform offensive actions, such as shooting.
- Every Y seconds, the Token Manager calculates and distributes points to all the entities of the arena, the amount of points they receive depend on following parameters described here:
  - Priority 1 (Max Points): Enemy which the player is shooting / aiming at.
  - Priority 2: Distance (Close).
  - Priority 3: Token assignment history: Enemies who have not received a token in a long time / performed offensive action in a long time.
  - Priority 4: Distance (Far).
  - Priority 5 (Least Points): Enemies who have just attacked or are reloading, as long as they are not in front of the player.
- The actor with the highest score will be chosen as the most relevant actor and gain a token (if at least one of the tokens is available). Depending on the max amount of tokens, there will be that amount of most relevant actors.

The Arena Zones, which contain information about all the covers placed inside them, so the enemies know which ones are free to use. Some entities make decisions such as flanking or fleeing depending on the state of the arena zones.

Meet the Mafia Goons!

The mafia goons are the first type of enemy the player will encounter in the game. They are a caotic and disorganized bunch, as opposed to the more coordinated and tactic agency enemies.

They have a ranged fighting style due to their Beretta M1938A, which outranges the player’s shotgun. So they prefer to keep distance and constantly shoot from behind their comfy covers.

They don’t enjoy seeing Francesca spend too much time behind a cover or in the same place, so after a certain cooldown they will throw a grenade at the player (if they are playing too defensive). By doing this they force the player out of cover so they can continue shooting them.

They can also flee if there is an empty cover in an Arena Zone behind.

Reinforcement Events

This event consists of enemies coming from out of the arena after the combat had already begun.

It can be triggered either by the player passing through an Event Trigger Box or once they have defeated all the enemies of the arena.

The reinforcements’ AI will be even more aggressive than usual and chase the player.