dgenos20’s blog

I’ve overlooked one very key aspect to my level for quite some time and it’s time to address it.  Lighting is something that I’ve been considering since I changed my skydome to a more early evening setting, but I was using a skylight still until quite recently.  Building and assessing with a skylight is fine, but it was really hurting the feel of the level.  After discussing a bit with my roommate, I’ve decided to go with a mid-evening light with a high contrast lighting set in the level’s walled sections.  Given that the level has been a bit transformed from its original idea of “castle siege with guns” to “lockdown of key location”, a location that’s been established as being defended and a military keypoint there would be large lights lighting almost every area of the space to spot anything that would try to sabotage the controlling force.  The lighting from above is mostly to avoid getting pure black shadows from all the spotlights and to meet nicely with the skydome selection.  The spotlights make the space much more dynamic and also help in pathfinding - an issue that some players had while testing, even if for a split second.  Now there is a clearly-discernible path to follow.  It’s almost complete, as I light the top of the wall a bit more, block off another section, and finally light the top of the collapsed tower.

I’m doing my final set dressing now, cleaning up all the floating geometry that I have laying around like a big pile of LEGO bricks around the field of play.  I found a nice stone wall to replace the current ones I have as well as some better wall-building components for the large building and interior space.  I’m going for a more elegant feel in the interior space, with statues, artwork, rugs, lanterns, and windows.  I think it’d be a nice visual break for the player to move through and to show a part of the space untouched by the wreckage outside its walls.  The outer terrain is almost complete - it consists of large boulders slabs angled in such a way to give the area a greater sense of depth while hiding the edges of the land.  It still needs other objects out there; I’m considering building mini versions of towers and outposts in the distance to give a less sparse look to the terrain, as it’s bland right now, but workable for the moment as there’s bigger things closer to the player to deal with.

I feel like I’m kind of behind on this project…  Maybe it’s because a close roommate of mine is nearing full completion of his level and mine is just now to the final set dressing and clean-up stages that makes me feel so behind.  It’s not a time management issue so much as a time allotment issue: I have job scheduling that messed up an entire week of mine, so that has to change, if not go away entirely for me to get more done.

Anyway, I let a few people playtest my level today and found a few things out very quickly:  they’d never played Gears, nor knew how to succeed in it, I needed ammo pickups, I have a glitchy sound node, and that (to my surprise) all the main functions are working as intended.  Some more covernodes were needed and added between tests, but one thing I couldn’t figure out were the FoVs on the POIs I have set up: none of them would zoom in on the selected object, which posed a serious issue as most of them got lost killing the enemies instead of using the level cues.  Gotta make them more prominent.

I’d like to start by saying that at this stage, I’ve stopped saving my project under “bastion_#” and begun “bastion_BETA#”.  My level is now fully functional from start to finish!  With the tower collapsed correctly and animations and ladders set up for the player to climb to the final objective, it’s ready for playtesting.  This update is all about the shiny, flashy, and loud things that make an experience more engauging.  Since I have all the main aspects taken care of as far as core gameplay is concerned, I decided that I’d flesh out all that I have.  This means browsing the large library of particles and sound cues to insert into my events to make them far more engauging.  Music for my level has been a concern of mine for quite some time, but I think I’ve found a correct feel that I want in my level.  It’s actually a file from an old game called “Lords of the Realm 2″ by Sierra; a battle theme no less.  It has a very retro gaming feel to it, and seems to fit nicely.  I just have to convert it over to a WAV and import it…my only issue has been that it claims the WAV file is “bad” and won’t import properly.  It may have just been the program I used - have to try again since I’d rather not go hunting for another track this late in the project, though I do have a couple in mind.

With the tower added in, the fun began with varying degrees of Radial Force volumes, matinees, KActors, and force field exclusion volumes.  The unforeseen issue I had was with the actors from other explosions tapping the tower KActors and blowing up the whole shebang.  With a semi-quick fix of blocking volumes and toggles, that issue was wrapped up nicely and works fluidly.  I’m considering putting in another catapult shot or two to the tower to collapse it, but other things require my attention first.  As far as the final tower outcome, it’s fully particled and didn’t come out quite as I thought, but great in a new way.  The effect of the tower roof falling onto the player’s path and crushing the seemingly-right way to go into a pile of rubble and debris was a nice way to explain the broken segments of wall and path.  All in all, it’s cinematic and has a great feel for the level, even if it’s mostly aesthetic only.

The one thing I absolutely have to have modelled is my tower.  I began work on it in class and got just the base and spine done.  Later on, I decided to cut the tower into three parts: base, section with a door, and section with arrow slits.  These parts weren’t difficult, but it got a bit more tedious as I started dividing it up into its various fracturing points, cutting them out of the original and replacing the faces.  It took about a day and a half to two days, but everything is imported into the editor, in place, and ready to be blown up.  Since this is going to be a major cinematic moment in the level, I need to be sure to make it look good with a strong matinee, camera effects, POIs, and particles.

So the time has come to change my animation for getting the player over the flaming pit of emulsion and on to the next area.  The whole “riding the pillar to victory” approach didn’t work so well, and looked ridiculous.  I’ve thought on it and revised it now.  It still begins the same, with the player climbing the ladder to the precipice where they shoot the explosive tanks to remove the barrier, but now instead of climbing the pillar and riding it, I cut to a camera and teleport the player to a safe spot and hide them.  A skeletal mesh of Marcus takes over as the catapult hits the outer pillar, fracturing it.  The pillar breaks at the point of impact and slides off the base (as seen in many reference videos of building demolitions).  It collapses down into itself and into the emulsion.  The top part of the broken pillar tilts and drops onto Marcus’ standing location, causing it to crumble down into the pit.  As it falls, Marcus leaps out from the crumbling floor, across the emulsion pit through troika fire, and to the safety of the other side and a wall to hide behind.  It looks much much better now.  It just needs sound and maybe an animation of the skeletal mesh shooting blindly toward the enemies as his footing is lost.

To create a sense of urgency to flank, I took out a chunk of the tower wall and put in an enemy spawn and a troika turret with suppressing fire in front of the barrier.  That way, players will be deterred by something and can’t simply jump over it.  I also added in another sound cue of Marcus groaning in frustration before yelling to flank left.  Hope it’s enough to show the player.  I could always use another POI I guess.

Derek playtested my level and it really showed me some broken parts of it.  Event 1, while great in theory, never really gave the player any incentive to climb the tower and progress.  He said that no real sense of ungency to flank was present, and suggested that maybe a guy could sit on top or be at an angle that couldn’t be reached by the current angle of cover.  It’ll take some experimenting, but it’s a good thought.  He pointed out some off sound cues, and other minor issues in trigger activation count, matinee playing, set dressing, and kill volumes.  Mostly minor things, but those are what make a level great

Cookson came by in class and we briefly discussed my level, but he didn’t have time to play it last class.  This class he did though, which was very beneficial for me.  He’s a little wary of my workload remaining, but I believe I can do it if I put my mind to it.  And so far things are going excellently.  He and I talked about the first animation sequence of the player riding the pillar down to the next small area.  Basically, he told me it looked fake and bad, and gave me some new suggestions such as the floor crumbling down and the player playing an animation of actually diving to safety.  This sounds much better, since my original idea did sort of fail.  Also, the level couuld use some more cinematics.  He didn’t look too far beyond that, but that’s a major crritique that does need some serious fixing.