Level Design Blog 8

Blog 8: 10/30 - 11/5

This week, I finished working on our RPP project. For the final touches, working with the rest of the team, we made sure that the outlets were fully functional and tinkered with the physics to make them feel more realistic. After testing the level with people who had never played it before, I found that one of the puzzles in particular was very difficult for people to solve, so I moved things around to create a more obvious path for the player, while still maintaining some difficulty by adding an additional outlet.

Although I thought the level ended up looking good as a standalone level, we got the feedback that the level of destruction within the house didn't match the story that was presented. I thought this was very good feedback, and in the future, I would want to incorporate story elements earlier into the project to keep the visuals from straying too far from the story that was being presented.

I also worked on my metrics level. The key components that I wanted to make sure were functional were the ability to respawn after falling from a cliff, since the entire level takes place on the side of a mountain, keys to unlock doors, and the ability to receive a weapon after picking up a certain number of pieces of a weapon.

I wanted to incorporate the Character Interaction pack, but I ended up running into problems when I realized that the pack doesn't support a first person perspective, so I attempted to combine the functionalities of the interaction pack and the built-in first person character.

I ran into significant problems, especially with getting combat to work between the two packs. In the future, I would want to do a lot more research before deciding to use a pack in a project, because I ended up losing a lot of time just trying to sync my existing progress with the first person character controller.

Overall, though, I'm happy with the aesthetic I began developing, and I'm excited to put more work into the real level.

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