WEEK 7
TEAM SPACEHOLDER
Week 4 (September 30th-October 6th)
During this week I was teamless and as of October 7th (today) I have now joined Team Spaceholder. Obviously, because of that, I was not working on any other games at the time so it was the definition of an unproductive week. So unfortunately I don't have much to say this week other than I am excited to get to work with my new team!
Week 5 (October 7th-October 13th)
Being my first week with the new team, my goal was to get up to speed as quickly as possible as we had the First Playable build due. Through this week I did more reading of the team documents to get myself acquainted with the game and concepts and got to work on environment design in Unity.
I built an environment we’ll be using in the playtesting demo but was not included in the “First Playable” submission. It is based on concept art done by other members of the team early in the development process and will continue to be inspired by further sketches when they are needed.
It is unclear whether this current environment will eventually become a portion of the final game map; however, it will be easy enough to implement as the tutorial area if we choose to do so. Testing of the area when building was done with a first person camera as opposed to the third person we will be using for the finalized game. I did pay attention to camera angles however so there are very few elements that will block the player’s line of sight to the character they are controlling.
As for contribution to the other elements of the submission, as a team we found that most of the questions being asked were based on comparisons from early semester decisions to now so I wasn’t able to get as involved as I would have liked. This was due to the fact that I was not present with the group until Thursday October 7th and our assignment was due only 6 days later on October 12th.
As we move forward I will get more involved as I will be diving headfirst into level design and environment creation as well as possible asset creation in Blender should I be needed. It is also a possibility that I will be aiding Wildan in the narrative elements of the game (story and dialogue) as I am very fond of fiction writing and have offered to be part of that process.
Week 6 (October 14th-October 20th)
This has been my second full week with this team and the workload compared to the ramp up to the first playable was quite different. In contrast to the workload to make our first playable last week, we had no deliverable this week so work slowed down. As a group we decided to take a slower week in order to catch up with other course work and relax our minds a bit.
However, I still did work here and there when I found the time. As I’ve joined Wildan as a Narrative Co-Writer, we discussed what had been written up to this point and I gave suggestions and constructive feedback on what we could do to improve it as well as planning for the type of dialogue and other story elements we have yet to create.
I also spent some time planning for how we are going to move ahead for level design. As I created an environment last week that unfortunately we were unable to use in our first playable because of integration issues between base Unity and the Unity Render Pipeline, I am again in charge of designing a new environment. Moving forward I’ll be creating a whole new world with a portion of which will mimic the environmental feeling of the first iteration. This new map will be much more influenced by the concept art done by the team at the beginning of the semester and start to introduce the multiple “Worlds” (environments) aspect of the initial idea.
In the weeks ahead the map will be continually developed and updated with more assets as they are created. Here’s hoping everything runs smoothly for the rest of the term, fingers crossed.
Week 7 (October 21st-October 27th)
With no deliverable due it was a very much work at your own pace kind of week. Amongst other assignments I was able to start planning out our second level while Gregory worked on our first/tutorial level.
I have been tasked with design and then modeling in Unity the Mushroom Forest level.
I wanted to approach the level design in much the same way that one of my favourite franchises as a kid, “Ratchet and Clank”, did. It had a general philosophy that every level was a circuit in that staying on a single path without having to turn around would take you from the starting area all the way to the Boss area and back to the start via a one-way path. As I design more levels I will carry this idea with me which, fingers crossed, will result in some entertaining gameplay.
While planning out the level I wanted to have a nice mixture of environmental and enemy elements but I also needed an area where the player could pick up a new weapon so I devised an idea which I believe incorporates all those elements. As shown in the photo of the planning stage I plan to have the player begin in a starting area that connects to a swamp-like area in the middle of the forest where they can explore. But if they were to journey on down through the mushroom forest there would be another path they could follow. This path would eventually lead them to a cliffside they must scale in order to continue traversing the landscape. Once the player is atop the cliff it is revealed to be a plateau where a portion of the ship the player crashed in had split off and landed. In this area they will find a new weapon which they will then get to use in a basic combat area in order to get acquainted with the weapon. Following that they descend back down into the mushroom forest, through a secondary and harder combat zone before reaching the boss area in which the boss will emerge from a cavern to attack the player. Once the player has defeated the boss they will be able to take a one way path back to the starting area of the level and leave if they so choose.
My hope is that the gameplay and level design will remind a player of Ratchet and Clank when we’re done as I would consider that a huge compliment.
I was also made aware that Wildan had written some more narrative elements but I have not gotten around to viewing those yet so I feel I’m underperforming in my role as co-writer but I’m excited to read what’s new and get more involved.
Week 8 (October 28th-November 4th)
This week I was on background development. What I mean by that is while the rest of the team was hard at work getting the Alpha Code Demonstration up and running, I was planning and building levels.
I began with sketching out some path ideas for the Mushroom Forest level that would unfold at the will of the player. I wanted to have two paths; one main where the player would acquire a weapon along the way and the necessary ship parts from the level boss, and a second optional path that would grant the player either a new weapon or item. Building off that idea I also wanted the level to teach the players certain aspects about the game (exploration, advanced combat, and game mechanics). To do that I focused on what I could do environmentally to acclimate the player to the game. For example, there is a one-way path leading from the boss area back to the initial starting point in which the player must drop down from a raised path in order to return to the start, meaning they won’t be able to access the path when they first start the level. However, upon completing the level the player receives anti-gravity/jump boots which allow the player to jump up to higher locations. This means that what was originally the one-way path is now a two-way path should they like to return and explore.
From the sketches, I moved on to sculpting the environment in Unity. Unfortunately, my first attempt ended up being gigantic in terms of level to player scale, and efforts to size it down were creating too many problems. This meant I had to restart, but with the knowledge from the first attempt, it proceeded smoothly.
With the inclusion of a basic terrain modeling pack offered by Unity and environment models (mushrooms & more) created by Kibi, I was able to get the build moving in a direction that will eventually resemble what we as a team envisioned through the original concept art.
I still have more work ahead of me though with more levels to design so for now it’s time to put my head down and get to work.
Week 9 (November 5th - November 10th)
This week, like last week, I was working behind the scenes on the levels. I’m getting closer and closer to finishing the Mushroom level and there’s not much left to do at this point before I can move on to the next level.
As for progress with designing the current level, Kibi has been hard at work building environment assets which has immensely helped populate and bring life to what was once an empty grey plane. I also created some simple textures using photoshop and a blend of colours to keep ram costs down while still adding some colour into what was once a lifeless map.
The photos below show the current state of the level and I am currently in the process of working on lighting. I am trying to be creative but I have to balance how I want to make it look with how much time it is going to take me as I still have more levels to build.
Once I’m finished up with the Mushroom Forest I will be tackling the desert level. The desert will be an interconnected series of paths that the player can get lost and disoriented on thus encouraging exploration to reach the main boss area. In order to remove that earthly sense, we as a team discussed playing with colours for objects we wouldn’t see here on Earth. For example, I threw out the idea of having purple sand and while it’s such a simple change, it’s exactly what we’re looking to do.
Week 10 (November 11th - November 17th)
Unfortunately, I caught a bit of a flu bug this week that put a damper on my work and I fell behind a bit. Luckily for me, I was just to be concerned with polishing off the Mushroom Level to get it playable ready. I had lighting and primarily bounding boxes to do as well as the caves at the entrance to the map and the boss encounter area of the map.
The lighting was fairly bog-standard, nothing new, just general point lights in order to provide a luminescent look to the flora placed around the map and a few larger point lights to highlight the interiors of the large towering mushrooms.
I placed a few more models made by Kibi around in order to populate the map a little more and added in some grass to give the ground a less blank feel.
From there I mainly concerned myself with boundaries for a while. World boundaries, cliff boundaries, and water boundaries were all very important to ensure the player did not cross into an area they aren’t supposed to be or use the freedom of movement as a way to skip over various portions of the map. I added more bounding boxes to props around the map to keep the goal of directing the player a certain way using visual cues and finished off that task with a pat on my own back, haha.
The caves I wanted to implement promised to be quite tricky but in the end, I found a solution. A Unity Asset Store plug-in called Digger allows the developer to dig into a certain piece of terrain and have the terrain mold itself around the cursor as they do so. Much like digging a hole into the side of a mountain in Minecraft, you don’t see the void below the main terrain layer, you see a hole with terrain on all sides. After about 40 mins of frustrating trial and error, the software eventually worked (I'm not quite sure how) and I was off making caves to my heart's content.
Next up, the Desert Level, and I plan to have some fun with my new cave tool.
Week 11 (November 18th - November 24th)
This week involved a lot of “crunch” work unfortunately. Due to it being Final Project season time is prioritized based on a due date system in which the next assignment or milestone due necessitates all my attention until it is completed. Unfortunately that happened quite a bit during this week so the majority of my level design work was done within the last day and a half before the submission was due.
Having finally finished off and “shipped” the Mushroom Level to the team Google Drive last week, my task this week was what I thought would be the Desert Level. However, as we neared the deadline for the Beta Code submission I knew I wasn’t going to have enough time to build out the entire level as well as coordinate with Wildan in order for the level to fit into the overall game story in a way that makes sense. As the submission approached I had to audible into building a different area of the game that I would actually have time to put together before the milestone was due. We had been having talks for weeks now about a Hub World that would serve as the main home for the player while they played Athiktos. This would be where the players ship was located and where they would return to reattach and fix parts of it. It would also be the travel hub with entrance and exit tunnels to each different level.
Knowing the scale of this Hub World would be much smaller and the path and ramping designs would not apply given the level’s purpose, I knew I would be able to finish this on time. So with that thought of success in a small time frame in mind, I began designing the hub level in Unity. The idea of having the ship and player being located at the bottom of an ice pit appealed to me so I began building a large pit-like structure using simple terrain tools. I then began chipping away at the side-walls of the pit with my Digger Tool asset that I mentioned in last week’s blog to roughen up what would be an ice wall.
After digging out the pit I retrieved several custom models that Kibi had created to place within the level. A mixture of crystals, mushrooms and a crashed ship allowed me to bring the level to a point I was happy with and looked visually interesting and stunning. After an overnighter worth of work, the final design of this level came together and is shown in the pictures below.
Week 12 (November 25th - December 1st)
This week was quite hectic as we moved into submission time for final projects. As I was primarily occupied with other classes, my time to work on the final 2 levels was limited. Unfortunately, I was aware that time was ticking down which only added to the stress.
Luckily, the Desert level I started work on is supposed to be very barren and I had done some sketches to plan out how it was going to look beforehand, factors that allowed me to get the base terrain created and textured quite quickly. I dropped in a few models made by Kibi and it is coming together nicely and most importantly, quickly.
With Gregory able to drop in enemies, weapons, and ammo/health pickups fairly easily, it has become less stressful to transfer maps his way without having to worry about extended amounts of time.
I should be able to finish the desert level fairly quickly, unfortunately, the crystal level is going to take a little longer. I see some sleepless nights ahead of me.