A week of polish.

This week has been spent doing all sorts of small, often un-noticeable things.

I created a key, which will act like an indicator- To show the player which keys has been collected. This is the only piece of actual HUD we’ll use, but we deem it necessary as we do not want to confuse the player; which key did he just pick up? Was it blue? Maybe green?
Below is the first Mockup I created with HUD in mind:

And here’s the key I created this week:

The key above will then be re-coloured depending on which door it can be used upon.

I’ve also been doing some mockups as to how the guards will react to the player. Below is the mockup I created to display the relation between the guards ”Seeing”-radius and his ”Shooting”-radius, the red being his Seeing-radius and the white being his Shooting-radius. If the player is within the red area; the guard will run towards him until he is within shooting radius.

The rest of the week was spent doing Producer, Designer and some QA work. I’ve been acting as an interface between everything and seeing to it that it was completed in time, as we want it to be as playable as possible to the BETA.
We ran into some issues regarding our level design, which we had to solve. The problem was this:
We create our levels in three stages.
-Stage 1: Create a general concept to get the flow of the level.
-Stage 2: Create a full-blown level and place all of the furniture and patrol-patterns (In Photoshop)
-Stage 3: Create the level using our level editor with the Stage 2-image as groundwork.

While Stage 1 and 2 progressed as planned: Placing all of the furniture in the editor is a bit clunky and takes time. This is also the main reason we have Stage 2; we don’t want to have to correct parts of the map afterwards. It needs to be thought through completely first. This meant that our planning went a bit bust, but we solved it by allocating more time (One extra pair of hands) to the task, increasing the workforce on it from 1 to 2.

My QA-work has been spent on making sure the levels are ”Fun” and that they look ”Alive”. We currently have a bit of an issue with that on our ”Level 1″, which will be corrected on the coming weeks leading up to release.
The problem is that it feels lacking, and with many empty areas and the same kind of furniture. So I said ”MOAR PLANTS! NAU!” to get some more color variation into it, which will hopefully solve that issue.
Below is the level in its current stage:

Thanks for reading – Hopefully it wasn’t too much of a hazzle to get through, as it may be a bit all over the place.

Cheers,
Henrik