Container City Project Review

This has been a pretty odd week of having so much to do yet nothing to do. Having completed our stuff back in week 3, Becky and I have spent most of this week looking for things to add and improve in the level which by this point was only half finished as we waited on the other half of the team to finish up with their assets and textures. For a group project there wasn't much of a group for most of it, communication hasn't been the best so Becky and I didn't know if there was anything we could help with to speed up the process so we kept ourselves busy where we could. Becky set up an awesome menu screen and pause function.

As well as that she got sounds hooked up to my blueprints and matinees, worked on her plant textures with subsurface scattering, worked on the post processing and a vast range of other work that she needs a pat on the back for. As for myself I was doing odd jobs: 

• Arranging the asset files for submission 
• Setting up a mesh and material to cast more controllable Godrays 
• Getting the level to fade in from black when you start playing 
• Fade out to black at the end
• Adjusting the timelines in the blueprints
• Overall troubleshooting

I'd added a slight flicker to the powering on of the emergency lights for a touch of realism but in the last few days we found that at random times when someone was playing through the level this would cause the lights to not stay on so I spent a good while troubleshooting that but to no avail, I have no idea why is does that so I had to settle for a sight delay instead. While we were waiting for the last bits of work to go in we also got a lot of opportunities for people to play through it and give us feedback or see what could be done based on how people played.

We had many on occasion where people would jump to try and save themselves from the collapsible floor so we made sure there was a blocking volume to hinder their escape and avoid the chance they they would just break the level. Another common one was that once people reached the final room they would want to get through the door I had left ajar to help lead them towards the drop floor so if nothing else other than to amuse myself at their disappointment I set the door to slam shut on them if they interacted with it. 

As for my area of the level I was happy with the atmosphere and people who played through said it was an area that unnerved them which is a reaction I was pleased to get through I had a lot of trouble trying to balance the lighting. I had each lamp with a point light to illuminate the area and a spot light to reflections I wanted on the surface of the water but when I adjusted them the scene was either too dark or too lit and I couldn't seem to hit an in between but I think the red works with the colours of the walls and the yellow of the pipes like I planned so overall I do like my lightening even if there might be a bit much of it. 

Meanwhile Becky's greenhouse is looking awesome and we finally got the windows to be translucent enough to pass for windows and not wooden boards but opaque enough that you couldn't make out enough outside them to see there was nothing there. That had proven to be quite the uphill struggle.

As for the rest of the level I'm not as happy with. I'm glad we got it finished and working but the fact we didn't see much of the others meant we didn't see much of their work until we were too close to the deadline to make any real changes. Some of the biggest problems with this was there wasn't time to check for consistency so some assets look too cartoony or some textures look too clean so they don't sit in the scenes as well. Having everyone there might have been useful for the other major problem I have with our level which is how anticlimactic the ending feels, since it went in so late there wasn't much we could do once it was there and we went 'Crap. It doesn't work'. It's very visually diminishing having passed through the bright greenhouse and the intense red in the lower levels to a pretty boring standard room with not much too it. Until the last couple of days the only thing we had to go on for the ending room was the concepts for it and when the final product appeared and didn't really resemble the concept we weren't exactly sure what could be done from that point and had to let it go.

There are a lot of improvements that could be made but interactions and a lot of the assets of pretty polished I'd say. A play through of the final level can be viewed here.

Considering it was a group project I wish there'd been a bit more of a group dynamic for it, with half the group absent from the labs most of the time there weren't many ideas or problem solving beyond the scope of Becky and I so there were probably a lot of cool things that could have gone in that we might have missed but this project is done now and time to move on. 

Overall it's been an interesting exercise in level design and patience....mostly patience.