Elden Ring Dungeon Design

My first step was to open up Elden Ring and play through the Hero's Graves again to map them out and remind myself how it feels to play through them, as well as double checking with the wiki. Through doing this, I felt that the Giant's Conquering Hero's Grave was the most interesting both because it's the most late game example of the Hero's Graves, making it one of the most challenging ones, and because the shadow mechanics and lackluster choice of boss gave me room to brainstorm my own ideas. I liked both that I came up with, a reactivating shadow form and a mist form that can only deal elemental damage, so I designed the dungeon with both in mind.

After mapping out the dungeon I reviewed what I learned to try and understand important ideas like how many enemies FromSoft would place in a room, the general aggro ranges, the pacing of crafting and upgrade materials, runes, and especially how they would place important pickups like weapons and talismans. I then made my own model and tried to find the correct balance between following FromSoft's example and trying to do my own thing. A big focus was on trying to envision how my changes to the shadow mechanic would impact how FromSoft paces encounters, since it means the player can only deal damage to the enemy inside a relatively small part of the room, as opposed to the "dispel-and-forget" nature of the mechanic as it exists. I decided the standard soldiers and knights were better enemies for this then something like a Burial Watchdog due to the latter's AOE attacks likely being unfair.

The final step was opening up Unreal Engine 5 and implementing my design. This part was the simplest, the main issue was getting the scale for rooms, stairs, and distance between floors to feel like how it does in the actual game. Once that was completed, I wrote up both a summary of my thought process, as well as a room-by-room guide for how this dungeon would work, which, again, you can find here: LINK