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Level Design Blog 16

 Blog 16: 2/12-2/18

This week, I spent a lot of time filling the level with props and testing the level.

Since a good portion of the gameplay involves searching for keys and instructions to scare the bear out of the train station, I wanted there to be enough clutter in the train station for there to be at least a bit of a challenge. I also wanted to tell a story with the things in the station. 

One thing we've been focusing on in our capstone levels is theming different areas of the same building--for example, in our high school-themed levels, having spaces themed after a school dance and a school play in order to give more life to the space. I thought the same sort of theming could be very helpful for the train station, so in each room I worked on, I spent some time thinking about the theme and story of that room and how it got into the state it's in now.

 

 
 



I still plan to come back to a lot of these rooms as I continue to fill in the building. I enjoyed adding life to the building, especially in the areas that the teenagers in my level had already spent time in. 

Speaking of adding life, as I tested my level, I realized that the bear continued to pose a bit of a problem. The first issue I ran into was that the bear tended to suddenly jumpscare the player by sticking its face through walls, which was thankfully easily resolved by moving the bear's collider out a bit in front of its face.


The other issue I was running into, though, which was the reason that the bear was sticking its head through walls in the first place, was that I had set the AI up to move directly to the last place it had seen the player as soon as the player was in its line of sight--which means that as long as the bear is in motion, the player can't really hide from it. There are a good number of spaces to hide in in the main level of the train station, but because the bear wouldn't stop moving once it had started, there was almost no way to shake it off your trail. 

To try to solve this, I added in a proximity check, so that the bear wouldn't keep chasing the player if they got far enough away. Unfortunately, that somehow created an infinite loop, which crashed the engine completely, so instead, I widened the acceptance radius for the movement, so that the bear would stop further from the player's last location. That also didn't really work, though, because it also made it much easier for the bear to be considered in range to kill the player.

Finally, I changed the check for killing the player to be based on the player's current location and not its last known location, which seemed to solve the problem. The bear is still pretty scary when the player is in the same room as it, but it isn't quite as omniscient, which feels a lot better. 

I also worked on adding narration to the level. In The Long Dark: Wintermute, the player character keeps up a stream of commentary on the surroundings. I wanted to keep the dialogue present, but minimized, so that the character isn't commenting on things that are obvious, but might say things to make the player think a bit harder about their surroundings.

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