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.