Hello everyone to my final blog.

In this last post, I want to bring up the situation the project is facing now and what to do at the end. Then I will cover the final insight of my work, conclude it with my reflection of the project, and what I have learned from all of this.

The final days for the project

The deadline is around the corner for me and the others who have done what we could so far, and we have come to a conclusion that we can’t finish this game project in time. The reason why is that we have encountered an issue with the Github master branch and knew that this can’t be fixed in time. So what we are currently doing now is to gather everything that we have managed to work on, and having a presentation to show others that we have worked on something concrete under these 8 weeks.

As for me, I want to make a playable version of the game to explore my levels. In other words, it won’t contain anything but my levels that I have been working on. The point of this is to show this in the presentation to visually explain my level design to others, and also will adding this to my portfolio to help me get better chances of receiving an internship from a game studio.
Meanwhile, I am preparing to make a presentation of the project, which is my specialty, to make exciting powerpoint presentations to grab everyone’s attention.

The levels

The last days has had me working on a tight schedule and I felt that I received lots of realizations of what I should’ve done before making the levels, as I mentioned in my previous blog. So right now, here is where everything will be told about the levels so far in the end.

The park

I couldn’t find much to change in the park because it looked as good as I wanted. However, during the last week I have been adding lots of trees around the outside area and painted the terrain with road textures to make the level look more civilized. The reason was that I noticed the borders of the player camera shows that there were empty space that makes the level look less believable. As for the lights, “again”, I switched them back to auto in the render mode, and then made changes in the graphic settings of the project window[IMAGE]. I learned this alternative from my teacher who once worked for the game studio Ludosity. When I was finally done putting invisible walls around the park, I then moved on to the next new level, Luna’s hideout.

Graphic settings

The layout of the park level

Lunas Hideout

Working with this new level was very refreshing, compared to the park level. The first thing I did was make a hill from a terrain object, then added additional trees that I had to change the scale and positions of to have a clear view for the player camera in the scene. After that, I painted the terrain with different layered textures, and put a point light above the scene to illuminate the dark area which then made the level look more immersive by the “moonlight”. Speaking of moonlight, I made sure that no shadow was covering the mine shaft. This is to highlight the place where Luna lives and for the player to find it. At last, I was making the final touches by adding invisible walls, background sound, music and sound effects for the player movements which I even did the same thing for the park level.

The layout of Luna’s hideout level

My reflection of this project and work

When I think about this project coming to its end, I sometimes get flashbacks of how it was from when it started. I remember when my game project got voted and was very happy that I got the leading role, even if the main role of mine was level design. It was full of enthusiasm during the first two weeks as I was working with the levels. But after that, I encountered many issues on the way such as filling the missing information of the design document, and working on the flowchart of the story which made me very exhausted.

However, coming this far has made me learn many beneficial things from it and from others who worked hard to develop this game. The best things I learned from this project was to always have a schedule of milestones to properly organize the workflow and have the design document prepared before the project begins so that everything is ready for others. As for the work that I have learned from which I might have mentioned everything about it in the previous blog. But the best things I learned from this was not just the practical techniques, it was when I studied the theories behind level design, which gave me a lots of knowledge and understanding of the importance of level design.

Coming to the end of the game project is overwhelming. After many weeks of working together for this game was great and I believe that this was worth the time. Why? Well, because I now have learned how to avoid making the same mistakes as I did and it is all thanks to this project that I have also learned my weaknesses such as writing good blogs.

I’d like to thank you everyone who has followed this game project so far, which is enough proof that this was indeed an exciting game to make. For me, this game is like a dream come true, because the concept and the story was originally created by me, and even if the game wasn’t finished in time, I will still carry this with me as my future game project.

This is Emanuel Holm speaking, goodnight.