Assets for city 1, part 1
After last week’s work we decided to stop making new levels for now and focus on finishing the first city with assets and all mechanics and systems polished. We chose this because we want to have something to show to people to check the current direction we are going for works. Also, since I had finished the levels from the 1st city earlier than expected we won’t be straying away much from the original schedule.
The process for this week was iterating on doing the white-boxing on each level, test is work gameplay-wise, iterate on it until it worked and then place assets instead of the white boxes. I want the assets to tell a story no matter how simple, instead of just being there to fill space, so what assets are present in each level is important.
For Level 1 the idea is that the player character just decided to start its vacations, thus it starts in the more standard part of the map. After moving to the right it finds the first ruins that are a part of the city. I wanted this contrast to slowly create the image of progress in the adventure.
On Level 2 the player starts in a simple commercial area that from the start has ruins visible but it is still not much. This map indicates that the adventure has just started and the player character is still getting ready.
Level 3 is the start of the vacations in force, with the buildings either having the old town architecture or being visibly interesting. Also, this map has lots more ruins and beautiful sights, though those assets aren’t ready at the moment and thus I used simple plants or left the empty space for now.
On level 4 I want to create the idea of finding a part of the city that was built around the ancient ruins, preserving a lot of them. Also, I wanted to start creating a visual image of the geography of the city with the level going ever upwards indicating that at least a part of the city is built on a mountain.
This week I managed to place the minimum required assets from levels 1 to 4. At the moment we have the bare minimum assets like walls, some plants, chairs and desks. That was enough to get an early idea of how it would look and more importantly, what it is missing. Because of this, as I finished with a level I would revisit our asset list and add, replace or remove assets as needed. We don’t have the manpower to create a large quantity of assets so we need to be mindful to only create what we need. So far we have not needed to discard any asset since production started and I would prefer to stay like that as much as possible.
While doing the art pass I focus on placing objects that help with blocking and directing the player view, once that was done I started placing objects that only helped with the aesthetic. Once that was done if the general idea of the map worked I would continue to the next map, else I would try changing the colors of some of the assets to see if this fixes it. For levels1 to 3 everything went smoothly but on level 4 I started having issues. As most of the level is visible from the starting position thanks to the level layout and camera angle, level 4 can feel a bit overwhelming. To fix this I placed some objects in the starting area to block a bit the player’s view of the west and east areas. This helped not only by lessening the amount of information the player received from the start, but also by guiding the player’s view towards the north where the objective is positioned. The issue is that the moment one arrives at the west area a good portion of it is still blocked by the objects. I attempted many configurations that achieved what I needed but none worked, either they just didn’t block the player view from the starting position or they kept on blocking the players view where it shouldn’t. At the end of the week I didn't manage to fix this issue, reason why I spoke with my partner and now she is going to develop an occlusion system to hide objects that are between the player character and the camera.
Next week the objective is to finish making and placing all assets on maps 1 to 6, after which we will make a build to show to people.
