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Level Design Blog 20

Blog 20: 4/1-4/8

This week, I finished the mock design test. As I was working through it, I found that I had a lot of uncertainties about the process; although it made working on the assignment more difficult, it was probably very good experience for future job applications.

The biggest hurdle for me during this project was using Autodesk Maya, which may be my new least favorite program. The program kept crashing for seemingly no reason as I was modeling the scene, which became increasingly more common as the level became more complex. I tried to mitigate some of the issues by staying on the FIEA VPN, saving frequently, and merging meshes and deleting history as I worked, but even with that there were probably dozens of Maya crashes, and once where my entire laptop bluescreened. Most likely, it's an issue with my specific machine, and not with Maya as a whole, but it made the whole process much more tedious either way.

The other challenge I faced with Maya was that I had only ever used it to model single props and meshes before. Creating an entire level in Maya was a whole different challenge, and I found myself floundering every time I came up against something I wasn't sure how to solve. Exporting the scene to Unreal and creating a playable build turned out to be harder than I anticipated as well. 

On the bright side, though, I became much more familiar with working with imported meshes and collisions, and even though Maya is my sworn enemy now, I ended up heading right back into Maya to create a more complicated mesh for another project. 

 

For the level itself, I went with a modified version of an existing Uncharted 3 game mode, called Gold Rush, where a co-op team works to secure a piece of treasure. To complete the challenge, the players would have to collect three different pieces of treasure from around the map, then bring them back to one location to be picked up.


To be honest, I wasn't incredibly happy with how this project turned out. I felt like I could have done much more with the space I created, but I was blocked by both my inexperience with Maya and my uncertainty about what I was trying to create. I liked the concept of what I ended up with, but it was hard for me to gauge whether the level was interesting and compelling or not without the functionality to back it up.

If I were to do the design test again, I would have spent more time planning and iterating at the beginning before jumping into Maya, because I did a lot of work in the first week that I ended up scrapping. I also would have factored in a bit more time to work in Unreal; although the blockout was created in Maya, I would have liked to have the time to add more functionality than the simple respawn that I put in the build.

Overall, I think this was a very good learning experience, even if I think the project could have gone better. I think I'll feel like I have more clarity once I see what other people created, too; I'm looking forward to seeing the levels that everybody created.

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