This week was a busy week of big decisions and lessons learnt. I spent the first day of this week working in our prison level, creating events which would be triggered during gameplay. This included making the guard walk the player to the exercise yard and an intricate series of events which play out when the player first acquires the mechanical arm. The player picks the arm off the table which triggers glass walls to rise and alarms to sound, trapping the player. The player is taught how to use the grapple at this point and must use the newly acquired arm to swing up and out of the glass cage to a catwalk. As the player leaves the room through this catwalk, a number of guards can be seen below running towards the sound of alarms in the room the player just left. This was a cool moment! But we had a problem. The Armageddon convention was in just a few days and we didn’t have a game. We had a giant level which was filled with crates and columns and platforms but it didn’t support interesting gameplay and it was too large to finish it to high quality before vertical slice. After discussion with the team, we decided we should focus on building a level which was much more streamlined and focused on demonstrating all of the game’s mechanics; like a playground combined with a gauntlet. This was the perfect thing to let people quickly get a feel for the game’s mechanics (useful for playtests) and was significantly more feasible to complete during vertical slice. Despite Zac and Corne having spent a great many hours on this prison level, we knew it was the right decision to put that to the side for now. I worked with Conrad to quickly map out a layout for a linear level which would demonstrate all the mechanics with what we thought would be a natural progression in difficulty. We drew it all out on a whiteboard before I began grey-boxing it in the engine. The basic layout of the level took a number of hours to implement, but it was already apparent the benefits the gameplay would receive from it. I combined my level with 2 elements that Dylan had added into his own level. This was a series of moving platforms and grapples and a section which taught players about vents by blocking the player’s progress with a laser wall. The outline for the level is as follows:
I added a grapple playground at the end for the purposes of playtesting to give players more time to swing around between multiple connecting grapple points while avoiding pursuing guards on various platforms. I made an electricity particle effect for the blue lasers when the player comes into contact with one. I also experimented with what should happen to the player on contact. Initially, I thought freezing the player was a good idea because if the player got shocked and stunned by a laser on a moving platform, that platform could move out from under the player. However, this did not work well for walls of blue lasers as the player could get stunned multiple times and become stuck for a while. I changed the laser to push the player away on contact instead. This week I gave some sorely needed attention to the guards. I implemented the animations and make them react to sounds in the scene such as the player’s movement or alarms going off. This needs some refinement however as the guards have too much trouble hearing alarms. I also spent a little time on the camera, making it much smoother. Another important lesson learnt was from the time I spent working on a new character controller. I spent an entire evening and some of the next morning working on a new character controller after having some feedback that the current controller didn’t feel too great. I did another playtest with the I controller I had just built and feedback was slightly more positive but it still didn’t feel great. I knew that if I wanted it to feel great, it would take a lot more time. We ended up buying a plugin and we should have done this much earlier. Finally, I added in a variety of debug information and commands for the Armageddon play test. This included FPS, camera X and Y inversion, camera sensitivity and camera auto rotation. These values can be tweaked while playing. This was an important addition as players all have different preferences for how they want the camera to control.
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