Release Candidate One

This was another hyper productive, over-drive mode, team synergy charged week where we got a ton of shit done. There were a couple of crunch time moments during the week, but we were able to keep level headed and really charge through tweaking all the nuisances contained within the levels, as well as big and small bug hunts. The levels are coming together crazy nicely, all the different biomes are clearly noticeable and with the new lighting their really beginning to come to life.

My work this week was primarily slight touch ups with the glymytes, making sure that all of the students were collectible and displaying correctly as well as animating with the proper frames and at the correct speed. There was a lot of little polish elements that needed to be worked on, which the all-hands-on-deck meetings really helped to sift through these swamps of work quickly.

Our game is really coming together, it’s nice to see it come to life with the environments getting more and more fleshed out as well as the light passes that really make the world pop. The level design is really mostly done, just tiny tweaks with moving platforms around or adding one here or there.

Post Beta

There were quite a few crunch movements this week, but with the amount of people showing up to those pivotal meetings we’ve been able to really make leaps of progress on every front. The biomes that the art team have been looking real good implemented into the levels, I really hope that we will have time for a proper lighting pass as well. It would really bring the world together, particularly with its extra-terrestrial theme. The levels have also been worked on a ton, we had a bit of a scare with the bubble platforms being shrunk through some bug as well as being displaced throughout several levels. But the design is really coming together, now that the bubbles are all fixed things are feeling a lot better. I’ve worked on a document on how to approach the design layout for the glymytes in each of the levels, which includes how many exactly we want to have in each level. We’ll see how its received in testing and hopefully we’ll only have to tweak the numbers slightly, move their positions slightly.

I worked on a lot of different things this week, including fixing little bugs that were found in nooks and crannies. This included tasks such as fixing several scripting files to contain the correct tags for certain prefabs as well as updating certain gameplay objects within the scene to weak performance properties.

Preparation for Beta

This week was full of iteration on the existing levels, as well as figuring out how many levels we will be able to fit into the game before Beta. My biggest focus was figuring out how to place the Glymyte collectibles into the levels. The trouble with this is that the player has the ability to come into the game space in a ridiculously huge range of ways, making strings of collectibles a tricky thing to tackle. They have to placed in a manner that supports the player coming in from just about any angle, but at the same time are able to guide the player down the golden path as well as make it to areas of increased challenges and student collectibles.

Playing the game in class was incredibly helpful for identifying areas that need work and to get a broader view on how other players engage the levels. Discussing aspects of the level with Wilhelm as well as talking about the process of iteration and implementation of the level pieces helped to discovery that us level designers really need to start coming to QA to see first-hand how the players are navigating the levels. I had gone to QA the day before and realized just how helpful this was in the limited time I spent by our game while testing other games.

Post Alpha

Finishing up work for Alpha was a pretty crazy ride, however we still have a ton to get down before Beta is due, especially for the level designers. We aim to be completely done by Thursday with all of the gameplay and level design so that the artists can have ample time to art up the levels. I think that we can definitely have the levels ready by that time, although I will say that I am a bit worried with the amount of time that we are giving to the artists enough time to properly art up the game.

Coming up is just a ton of iteration upon the created levels, both from QA feedback as well as feedback generated from our design team. Along with finishing the levels, deciding what to keep and features or parts of features need to be cut. There is still a bit left to finalize, but at the speed we’re going now it’s certainly feasible. Our communication pipeline was been super spot on for a while, the weekly work meetings has produced a huge amount of progress and is maintaining very well. I still need to document out a level design bible of sorts to convey how we want the levels to shape themselves since there are three of us creating them and they need to flow better together.

Alpha Time!!

This week was a loooot of work meetings, communication chalk ups and level designing. The team got a lot done on all fronts, lots of environmental art was implemented and iterated upon as well as a good deal of juiciness was able to make its way into the game.

My work this week was a whole lot of level design, concepting the tutorial levels and iterating upon the concepts. I got a little bogged down on the iteration process of the concepted levels, Carlos helped pull me out of that polishing mode to just get more levels into the game, sense that’s what we really need for Alpha. However, I was very pleased to see that that extra time I spent on the levels where I did iterate more really paid off and were of much higher quality them some of the others. I’m very pumped to continue work on the remaining levels, getting them white boxed and in the game so that I can get to that polishing side of things with the gameplay as well as working with the environmental artists on making the levels feel like the world we are creating. This Sunday we will be finishing up all of the white boxing and I’m very excited for that!

GDC Week Reflection

Going to GDC is something that I allows knew that I wanted to go to my senior year at Champlain, hearing only great things from past senior classes about the expo. The first few days were pretty interesting, my favorite talks that I went to were the Level Design in a Day that happened on Tuesday, which had talks all throughout the day about everything level design. I went to a lot of those talks and really enjoyed them, some were more interesting than helpful but here were certainly those that were actually beneficial to listen to and take notes on (such as the history and future of level design in the industry.)

But when the expo opened up on Wednesday is when it was really time to bring the A game, having so many awesome meetings with studios that Daphne. Going to meet the Activision recruiters that Champlain has been fostering a great relationship with was great and we also were invited to come to the Activision after party that day. A few of us went to it and had not only a great time but also invaluable networking opportunities, meeting developers from Infinity Ward and being directed to there hiring manager to talk about current and future possible position openings.

Week 7 – GDC Prep and Post GDC Prep

This week I worked on implementing the first playable build for midterm, focusing on getting glyx and both collectible types into the level. Most of the student behaviors made it into the level, the only one that didn’t is the student behavior that used to be the Teleporter and now moved in and out of the background and foreground. Unfortunately there was a problem with the build that was made for QA, so there was no new information that was able to be gleamed on how to further iterate upon the level from feedback yet.

Moving forward I’m going to be working on getting that final student behavior into the game space as well as tweaking values of the students so that they work as smoothly and properly as possible. Further down the road I am going to start concepting all the levels that we are planning to have in the game, which is currently four. Each level should take approximately five minutes to complete and need to be full of collectibles, glyx and the belly-fish. These concepts will make the next step, blocking out, very streamlined and easy to implement and iterate upon. Once I’m done concpeting and documenting the levels I will iterate upon them and start to block them out.

Week 5 – Post Greenlight

We finished strong for Greenlight this week, getting everything we wanted in and passing the stage challenge with minimal things to polish up for the requirements. We finally have a settled in art direction, before we had been tossing back and forth having both the underground cave / drained water cavern level and the above ground level. Now we’ve narrowed it down to just the cavern, which will be nicer for level design at least, as well as being able to push the art in this single environment instead of cutting our manpower in two with different environments.

My work the past week was largely comprised of creating some level mock ups, basically taking previous sketches and updating them to the current glyx states and cleaning them up in Illustrator so that they were up to the presentation level of quality.

Going forward with the levels I’ve started take my mock ups and bring them into the game space, getting them ready for QA as soon as possible. I want to start with a jungle-gym like area that will contain both introductory skilled platforming aspects as well as intermediate platforms to perform some more advanced moves. Once I get a feel for how players are moving in the space and the limitations of the glyx and stretchy arm I’ll be able to start constructing the games actual beginning area and start scaling the difficulty appropriately.

Week 4 – Greenlight 2.0

So this week we didn’t end up challenging for Greenlight, but we made some decent progress in a lot of areas that we’re ready to finish strong with and be ready for Greenlight next week. We finally got a more refined art direction, which is probably going to be narrowed a little more even and stretch goals added on top of it. Alongside a decided art direction we also have a more refined sticky arm control scheme as well as better control support with more control over where the play can actually send their sticky arm.

This week I finished up the Collectible Behaviors VDD as well as some more level mock ups with the decided art direction. I also got together an asset list that we’ll need for platforming as well as general objects that  we’ll be needing to build out the levels. This helped to get more of an idea of what the scope is for the two different environments of levels we were planning on having. We were going to be going for an above ground level with weird alien trees and possibly ruins of a past civilization that used to live there.

Going forward I’m going to be working with Chris on implementing the different collectible behavior types into the game. Hopefully we’ll have some more students to place into the actual game by then, but it wouldn’t be imperative. I’ll also be updating the behaviors VDD if needed dependent on how close we are able to create them to the document.

Week 3 – Final Lap for Greenlight

This week consisted of mopping up the design, narrative focus as well as final art direction for the game. There’s a lot of work yet to do, but we sorted out a lot during class. The feedback that we talked about in class largely consisted of making sure that the glyx was entirely necessary as well as some narrowing down of the varies planet art scope wise.

My plate for the week consisted of the creation of visual design documentation as well as continued work on the initial part of the level. I’ll be moving from my paper sketches and Illustrator documents and into the game to start testing of them and implementation into the game. For Greenlight I’m aiming to get some of the level concept pictures to get an idea on the sort of assets that would be needed for constructing the level design consistently throughout the games development.

I will also be working with Chris on starting to prototype out the collectible behaviors into the game. I don’t foresee this being too much trouble, however I haven’t discussed with Chris yet at what his estimate on how long it might take. I’m excited to work with Chris again, we’ve worked on design and content tools a lot before and I haven’t worked side-by-side with him since last semester.