Alpha build

This week I’ve been working a lot on the level, to place out prefabs and make sure that it looks right. I haven’t had a part in the level design itself, but instead my task is the environmental design, to make sure that the level looks good and interesting for the player. To do that, I need a lot of meshes to texture and make prefabs of, and since we didn’t have too many I also modelled a lot, which means that the first couple of days was incredibly busy for me. But pooled with props that my teammates did, we then had enough resources for me to work with.

I have the responsibility to make the lightpass as well, creating the lights in the level, and it’s all quite difficult when you think about it, especially since I’ve never done this sort of work before. I want the rooms to feel like they have a meaning, like they were actually used for something once, so I want there to be a lot of things inside. But it can’t become too cluttered, and it can’t look like these objects can be interracted with or necessary for the player, since this is just for aestetics. Setting the lights are even more difficult since lights are a very important way to help leading the player through the levels, showing what’s important and what’s not. I find this work fun but very challenging. But hopefully practice will make perfect.

Below are screenshots from our alpha build of our proof of concept level.

To my horror, the colors and brightness are a bit off from the monitor I use to work on and the lights look a lot different when they are baked, but now that I know this, I’ll know what to work on and improve. We ended up with about 200-300 drawcalls through out the level, and since our maximum is 1000, I have a lot of room to work with.

We also had the big playtesting session for the alpha, and we recieved a lot of valuable feedback. Something that was recurring from several players was that they felt like they weren’t sure where to go or what to do. This is of course something that I really need to improve. While I don’t take part in the puzzle design, I feel like it’s my job to show the player what puzzle to do next. For example, right now it’s definitely not clear to the player what door to take in the first room, but I have an idea of how to improve that, both with props and with lights. I also think I shouldn’t be afraid to leave some areas much darker than others and I think I put too much light on unrelated areas, which means that the lights I put out to show the player the way doesn’t pop out at all. Also, last but not least, from now on I’ll make sure to have people playtest it a lot more to see if I’m on the right track.