Crunch Time!
This week is a little different from previous weeks. I took a pause on Discovery Park to work with my Game Studio class team project.
Our team was presenting a build of our studio game at PAX East!
This is an exciting game conference and a special opportunity to get a lot of players interacting with our game and giving feedback on the build. Opportunities like this are very valuable because you get to see how real players interact with something you made, not just classmates or professors who already understand the project.
I am the level designer and puzzle designer on my studio team, and I spent most of this week helping finalize the level for our PAX build. We spent many hours working and collaborating outside of normal studio time to make sure the game was stable, readable, and presentable for the show floor.
What Did I Do? (A Lot!)
My roles this week to help my team mostly included:
- Placing 3D props from the artists into the level
- Creating and assigning materials for 3D models in Unreal Engine
- Placing environmental models that make up the rooms and level space, ensuring alignment and proper collision were set up correctly
- Designing and building the lighting for the level (which was very helpful practice after just finishing the lighting work in Discovery Park)
Can We Do It? Yes We Did!
A big part of this week was polish.
At PAX, players may only play for a few minutes, they do not know the controls, and they do not know the goal of the game. The level and environment have to help guide the player and show them what to do without someone standing there explaining everything.
It also had to look good (which it did turn out beautiful). To achieve this, I had to think a lot about visual clarity, player guidance, lighting, and making sure important objects, especially puzzle objects, stood out from the environment.
The Build Finished and the Event Went Great!
The presentation went very well at PAX this last Thursday! The build worked as expected, and we got a ton of feedback and new ideas, as well as compliments on how it looked.
Next week, I will be returning to Discovery Park for Milestone 5, picking up where I left off on Unreal Engine VFX, Sequencer, and then Data Assets.
Until next time,
~Lauren
