Assets for the City, part 2
This week I finished placing all the assets we have ready in the levels and applied temporary textures to the assets to help define final colors. Also, I started working on the Game Design Document(GDD) and made some improvements to the levels.
I started by placing the assets on levels 5 and 6. Most of the assets of these levels are not ready, so I worked with the ones they shared with the other levels. This allowed me to make sure these common elements, that are important for the identity of the city, are used effectively instead of feeling like after thoughts. I want them to create a feeling of shared connection between levels while working with the level design to guide the player. An interesting insight that I learned from placing these elements is how, with the default colors, the stairs and the pillars merge together making it difficult to understand the layout of the level. This among other things, became small objectives to tackle once I finished with placing the assets.
Next I proceed to assign new colors to the world elements. Though some of the materials used work well, meaning they can be used for the final product, others I only used as temporary materials that made the asset pop-out of fade-in. In general, what I was looking for when assigning the colors was to make sure the elements that should call the player attention, guide them in a direction or that communicate information like enemy presence would be clear to see. All other elements should blend more with the background or not distract the player when in tense situations. With these changes all issues I noticed while placing assets were resolved, like the one with the pillars blending in with the stairs.
As for the improvements I made to the levels, these were mostly small changes that we noticed while playtesting. For example, in level 3 there were some plants that blocked the view of a good part of the lower level. I changed that with a fountain base that is at the height of the floor, no longer blocking the player view.
Between all these fixes, I took breaks and worked on the GDD. I noticed that a lot of the information for the game was not centralized and some things weren’t even documented. To avoid future problems especially when we start working with external people for specific tasks it is important that they can access this information easily. It is also important for us, as even I forgot what some of the things that weren’t documented are. Also, the act of documenting allows you to see when something has not been clearly defined or can be improved.
The plan for this week is to finish placing all assets in the levels with functional colors. With this we would have a playable demo of the game we can share to people to get the first external feedback since we started production.
