It was fun to watch my game prototype evolve from a simple design to a fully playable game. The design process was actually the most difficult part in constructing project Michael. The paper prototype took a series of changes before I finally decided on the approach I wanted to take with it. I wanted the player to visit a series of rooms; each room has a switch that activates the passageway to another location. The Final map design helped to further render out the plan of the level. The map flow-chart displays the correct order that the switches will be triggered in order to reach the end of the game.
The next stage of development mostly covered the coding section of unity. Learning unity seemed a tad bit easy to me only because of my early experience with a similar game engine (Unreal). I collected and studied many scripts that would ultimately compliment my game play. I used the pickup scripts for some crates in the beginning room, so that the player can physically pick up and carry the object around the room. I used a collect script for fuel cells that I spread around the level. The fuel cells were counted as points and displayed itself as a GUI in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Aside from the pick up scripts I used camera switch scripts for the cinematic sequences and simple trigger scripts for lights and animations for the switches and doors.
To test my scene for functionality I used a few simple place holder meshes. The place holder meshes allowed me to test the space freely and receive feedback from my peers. The modular placeholders were also great help when it came to actually designing the look and feel of the level. I first began with two Photoshop concepts of my level then textured and altered my level according to the influences that I shared in my design document. I used Mud box at a tool to design the look and feel of my level. Time was a great enemy to my project, so I decided that using Mud box would cut back on the hours spent in Photoshop or any other texture editor. After remodeling and unwrapping my placeholder meshes I imported their OBJ formats into Mud box. Mud box allowed me to create easy texture maps and normal maps. The only problem that Mud box gave me had to do with the normal renders. The Normal maps had a hard line somewhere on the unwrap. I later found out from a fellow student that it was cause by the smoothing groups used in 3ds max. Over all I ended up with pretty good looking textures and normals. I also enjoyed working in a new game engine. Working with unity allowed me to hone great problem solving skills.
