Change of Focus
This week was rather uneventful as I was moving house, setting up furniture, and whatnot, however, it has become apparent that because of our lack of actual puzzles in our prototype, we need to shift our focus onto the actual levels themselves in which most of the gameplay will happen so that we can showcase these and the ever-changing environments at the time of our final submission.
Carrying on from my ideation with James in the previous week, it made this level easier to get started with. James is now occupied with working on ‘Level 2’, which is his rendition of the underground jungle, whereas I am focusing on the final level, ‘Caverns’ or ‘Level 3’. At the end of Level 2 there is to be another ability you unlock; this will be the cloud ability which is to be used in Caverns.
As it stands, Caverns is looking more like a crater or deep pool, and other than the fact that I know there is to be caves that loop around to make it possible to get to the bottom in which you will make the final decision of the game, I am struggling to envision what types of puzzles that would appear inside them. I originally envisioned that the cavern would have a deep pool in the centre that would go down gradually but I struggled to see how this would be interesting or fun.
To speed up the process of level design and be rid us slightly of having to use ProBuilder, Georgi has purchased the Eternal Temple asset pack (Unity Asset Store, 2021).
We discovered a slight con with ProBuilder and that is that it can be difficult to see how big the levels are in comparison to imported assets, and it can make what initially looks to be quite small appear massive after dragging these assets into the scene. In hindsight, the Hub Level is huge, and it takes a long time to fill the space. Because of this, we are going to cut down on the initial volume of space and try to keep things simple due to the amount of time we have left, but also because it may be boring running around huge levels, we have to keep the gameplay fluent and dynamic when attempting to complete the puzzles.
References
2021. Unity. San Francisco: Unity Technologies
Mana Station, 2021. Eternal Temple. [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/eternal-temple-65780 [Accessed 20 August 2021]