Hello, Max here again. In this devlog I will show you the progress since my last post. I have worked mostly with level design this time hence the title of this devlog. But I also tried to make some time for improving my post-effects. The main reason that I worked so much on level design this time around is because we needed some levels for our first playtest.
Ok, let’s break down todays devlog.
Level Design
Playtest feedback
Post-Processing
Level Design
As I mentioned earlier I mainly focused on level design since the last post. But first I had to import the final assets into the project. Essential assets for the project such as walls, stairs, windows, door frames etc. These assets are the building blocks making level creation much faster.
I was done with the basic layout for the level in a day. After this I added textures, doors, and props. In the beginning the level was just one room but I soon expanded it to two big rooms with corridors leading from one room to the next. I also added tiny storage rooms to give the player more places to hide.
We were scheduled for a playtest that same week and I wanted to polish my level as much as I could in the limited time I had. So to achieve this I added sound triggers such as you can hear the wind if you stand near a window and floor creaking. Lighting was also very important for the feel of the level. In the start of the level I added a lot of lights to make the player feel somewhat safe.
As for the layout of the level. I really wanted the player to start of in a relatively safe place but very quickly force the player to descend for the safety into the mysterious manor. Here the player has the first enemy encounter.
After this encounter with the monster the player is lead into a dark maze-like library. I wanted the player to feel uneasy in the darkness. But at the same time I didn’t want the player to feel cheated, that’s why the monster never searches for the player in the library section.
Playtest feedback
We held a small playtest for people to try out a very very early build of the game. This was mainly done so we can go back and look at the feedback and compare to other playtests later down the line. Since we held the playtest on the 22:nd of December not a lot of people had time to test our game. We still managed to get some volunteers.
The game had some major bugs and wasn’t very long, but we still got some good feedback for future playtests. Most of the playtesters seemed to like the overall atmosphere of the game.
Post-Processing
As I mentioned before in this post I’ve mainly focused on level design and not post-effects. Still I did some tweaking and managed to get a pretty good horror feel using just one post-processing profile.
The game is getting better for each week. But we are starting to see our limitations as there is only a few weeks left on the project.
//Max Dörper
0 comments