Practical Project
Aim
The goal is produce some different environments that are designed as it could be a part of a game. The main focus is the level design and the visual look of it. There will be implemented some easy mechanics, but the main focus is to make something visually good looking levels.
I also want to focus on the emotional and dynamics in a level design, I want the player to feel that the level is alive and the kind of emotion that belongs to the environment.
Gameplay
The levels will be set up as a part of a first person adventure game with puzzle elements in them. The player has to solve these puzzles in order to continue. One example is the player goes through a placed filled with shipwreck in the middle of a fjord, and he finds three levers located on different places in this fjord, the player has to use them in the correct order to open a hatch located inside a cabin.
Motivation
My motivation for this project is that I want to develop my enviromental level design skills. I want to research on the emotional part of a level design aswell as the dynamics, so i want the player to feel different things while he goes through the levels. One example is that you go through these ruins in the desert and you go through these dark corridors which are really low lit, and there is a scary ambience sound in the background chasing you all over the place, making the player scared and stressed.
Environments
-Cliff in the jungle
-Snowy fjord filled with shipwrecks
-Ruins in the desert
-Lighthouse on a small island
-Alien laboratory
Production method/tools
I am making this in Unreal Development Kit, where I make my models in 3ds max. I use Photoshop to make my textures .
Test/evaluation
The testing/evaluation will be through a certain "survey", where I check ask some people to test out the environments to tell me what they feel when they play the levels. The feedback decides on how I actually work, so if I get some negative feedback i go back and perfect that, so I polish the first two levels before I consider making some more levels.
Research
Some of the research will be looking through what has been done that is similar to my project, looking through certain games/films that produce environments of high quality and look at what problems they might have stumbled upon. I will also as take a deeper look into the emotional and dynamical of the game through books and tutorials. There will also be research on the different kinds of environments I want to create.
Development plan
15..12: Finished with concept and main research of the environments
05.01: Finished with the first two levels and the testing of these levels, aswell as research on emotions in level designs.
05.02: Finished on one more level as well as the testing
05.03: Finished on one more level as well as testing.
15.04: If everything goes as planned last level finished, only fine polishing after this date.
