Level Design Blog 13

Blog 13: 2/22-2/28

This week, I worked more on the mechanics for my level based on The Long Dark and began to put together my metrics gym.

I was initially struggling to get some of the mechanics, even ones that came with the asset pack I'm using, to work in my metrics gym. I thought it might have been a bug of some kind, since the mechanics were working in the demo level that came with the pack. When I asked for a second pair of eyes, though, we realized that there were additional assets in the demo level; copying and pasting those assets into my own level made the mechanics work just fine.

In putting together my metrics gym, I wanted to make sure that all of the options for interactions were available to test. After disabling the jump on the player character, I added in a few simple obstacles with their dimensions, and then added interactable objects that came with the interaction pack.

The most difficult part of putting together the metrics gym has turned out to be the bear, which I am still working on finishing. As I was beginning to add basic behavior to the bear, I very quickly realized why my enemy AI had never worked in my Borderlands level--I had forgotten that I needed to add a Nav Mesh Volume to the part of the level that the AI would be moving through. As soon as I added the volume to my metrics gym, the bear began to work.

Knowing that I missed something so simple that brought down the quality of my last level so much is pretty disappointing, but I'm happy I know for the future, especially in case I ever go back and finish reworking my Borderlands level. For now, I'm happy that I've been able to make so much progress on the bear.

The last things I want to add are finishing touches on the bear--killing the player when it touches the player and changing the speed to be a bit easier to avoid, mainly--and a simple puzzle with sliding pieces to simulate the puzzle I want to have at the end of the actual level. I'm pretty confident that both of them will be fairly easy to add in, since I've already added the player death function and sliding mechanics are included in my interaction pack.

I feel much more confident working on this project than I did on my first project last semester, so I'm looking forward to getting into designing the actual level!

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