It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like A Game

Be prepared for a wall of text and images, this post deals with a large period of time.

After the conclusion of the Fall Quarter, the design team and art team knew that we needed to make some drastic changes to the game to make it enjoyable. Based on the playtests, and a whole lot of research, the design team decided to figure out methods of lengthening play sessions (specifically in levels). The method I thought of was combining the levels we had already made and make the six levels into two levels with three rooms. That may sound a bit confusing, so these diagrams may help out a bit.

Most of the alpha stuff got thrown out, partially because of communication errors, and partially because of our new design and art philosophies. On the art side (this is also talking about level design aesthetics), we wanted to change the visual aesthetics of the assets and how the assets get placed in the levels. First, we decided on having a hand-painted aesthetic, removed the foliage, and based a large portion of our style off of Hieronymus Bosch.

On the level design side, the playests showed that many testers were hung up on geometry that interfered with the desired play experience we wanted. So this time around we are making sure the assets never (or as close to never as we can get) intrude in play.

In the first five weeks of winter quarter, Graham and I started developing the diagrams shown above and base prototypes for levels. The programmers really stepped their game up this quarter for the level designers; Eugene and James created a suite of modular tools (like player and enemy spawns that link up to a level system control, or triggers that can cause objects to move in game with a plethora of ways to trigger that event inside the script) that sped up the workflow between the programmers and designers for quick prototype and playtesting. Here are some pictures of the levels in engine.

I also modeled some environment assets for the levels and generated the new (and improved) asset list for the new levels. I made sure to account for folder organisation within Unity with the new asset list.

I ended up getting very sick during this quarter and had to be hospitalized for about 2 weeks that complete with a bonus prize of minor surgery. Luckily my recovery time outside of the hospital was short, so I was able to resume my work in a timely manner.

Weeks seven through nine were pretty heavy for all sides of the the production team. All of the levels are set dressed and lit (with a very basic lighting setup, for now). And we had two  moderately successful playtests that helped the design team improve our spawn ratios, find bugs, adjust item drops, and physics issues.

All in all, this quarter allowed the game to grow in ways that I did not think was possible and I am happy to be on this team. And so continues the grind...