Level/Room transitions!
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Hello again! This week I will cover an interesting problem I encountered this week. The solution to the issue is probably obvious, but…Hopefully some good suggestions will come out of the comments! 🙂 So, in order to get some clarity on the issue, I need to explain how our game will handle levels/rooms. We will render out ONE room at a time, when we go into a new room, the old room we was in will basically be deleted, flushed out of the system temporarily, thus the active view available to the player will always be contained within one room. Now… The issue this presents is that the player will have to rely on visual feedback to know exactly where he is, since the orientation can be somewhat disorienting at times…Which leads us to the next problem, our game is strictly top-down which is difficult to rely on when it comes to portray what the objects and such actually are, since we are strictly confined to one flat surface. (Depth cues and other things available for us in the use of for example an isometric view isn’t as easy to achieve) That means the visual feedback the player will receive isn’t too reliable since the player is heavily constricted by their very own imagination. All we can do is attempt to hint the purpose of the room, and with those hints, guide the players imagination to what he is actually seeing. (For example in the medic bay there are several classic conceptions of medic/healing-indicative signs, such as a red cross and similar. So to combat this probable disorientation, we decided we needed some kind of level transition when we are switching rooms. So, back to the drawing board! The first iteration utilized the same top down perspective, the idea was that it should feel consistent with the rest of the game.
As you can see…It is next to impossible to know what the player currently is residing within relying on the exterior of the ship. Especially considering we don’t even know where the bridge is, what could be the cargo bay and so forth. So this idea was early scrapped. I wanted to explore having the ship be an integral part of the level transitions, because it would give the player a better sense of what the ship actually looks like from the outside. This was the quick result, and, whilst it may clearly give a better visual context of where the player is located on the ship, it still suffers from the same issue as the first sketch, purely exteriors does not work to portray what the room is supposed to be. So, I got the tip to attempt to utilize the rudimentary level map I used in our Game Design Document:
It could work, the problem however is that the player still won’t know what the ship actually looks like. So, I decided to combine the first iteration and this latest idea. Still in the sketching stage, this is the result: The plan is to put icons or something similar to properly show what the rooms actually are… And of course detail the ship exterior. That’s it for this week! Morgan out!  |
