You know, its never really easy to start a work of art that is supposed to play out in a sequential sort of way. Especially a video game.
The first level is monumentally important as its where you make that dreaded "first impression" people are so anxious about when they attend the dehumanizing ritual of job interviews.
In the first level the player will form his opinion on the vibe of your game, the controls, the graphics and wether or not he should play on once its completed. This is also why I always recommend people starting out a new project should write out their general idea in kind of a bullet point format and start somewhere in the middle. If you start making your game by starting with level 1, you either end up with a game that gets better as it goes along as you learn more yourself while developing it or you will inevitably remake those first few levels which is, of course, a much harder and longer process than starting level 1 in the middle of development and having a pretty good idea already for what it needs to have and what is realistically within your skill set to achieve.

So, now that I laid the ground work for this project I feel comfortable in attempting to make the first chapter. This will later also be a playable alpha just to gather your feedback and see how it runs for everyone. This is a new approach for me as in the past I've just shown screenshots until I released a v1.0 to the public and with my latest finished Project Atropos Mandate having turned out as kind of a disaster, I think this will be the smarter way going forward.

If you want to play said disaster for yourself, you can do so here: LINK

This level is a war memorial. Inspired conceptually by the statue of liberty and that famous first Deus Ex mission set in the same location, it allows me to organically drop a lot of exposition on to the player through environmental story telling that I would otherwise have to deliver via walls of text or dialogue. This would be clunky... really clunky. However, in this setting here, I can just add in optional content to explain some elements of the lore in a believable and optional way.

This also means that I had to make a lot of custom detail props that are not all implemented yet. Info panels with pictures about the eugenic wars, black marble memorial walls covered in the names of fallen soldiers and small statues of the heroes of said war.

Gameplay wise its a relatively open map that gives the player 3 objectives that he can then pursue in any order before moving on. This too seems to be a good way to introduce gun play and some other things that will be fundamental to the game. The multiple choice dialogue system, the hacking system I want to implement but don't yet have a killer idea on how to best approach it and the com-channel banter between the disillusioned protagonist and his more virtuous handler. its just a static prop, but you can also see some scifi-esque looking military barrieres that serve as cover for the enemies. These are designed to look fold able / portable, because the mission states that the hostiles took over the island 24 hours ago which would not have been enough time to set up the typical concrete road blocks you often see in fps games. Just goes to show that I tend to over think certain aspects of my game worlds.

Like a lot of my cyberpunk/scifi stuff, this island is also strongly inspired by eastern cold war era architecture and vibe mixed with a more tongue-in-cheek early 2000s vision of the future.