Academic Adventure

Introduction: This project is a walking simulator/platformer that takes the player up a temperate mountain full of hexagonal rock columns inspired by The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. Once at the top the player will dangerously leap across a great chasm, and make their way into a deep cave. Inside they will find a crystal chasm that will test their platforming skills. Rewarded for their skill they must now ascend above the mountain and arrive at a mysterious and ancient temple. After paying their respects, they’ll leap to the temple exit and prepare for their next adventure.

What Went Right:

Theming - At first I was very concerned how much my partners and I would be able to mesh together our creative visions to try and form a cohesive experience. Thankfully with the technology available to us we’re able to share ideas as well as assets for our projects regardless of the day or time. This has enabled us to key in on each others workflows more intuitively and react accordingly without the need for excessive sharing of information.

Hunting for Assets - Thanks to Unreal Engines massive catalog of assets it was really easy to find and accumulate what I needed in order to put the vision together. My biggest concern was finding an asset pack that contained hexagonal pillars, as I had decided during the design process I wanted these geometric shapes to be a cornerstone of the location's uniqueness. Luckily I managed to find two hexagonal rock pillars the fit the criteria for both my design idea as well as the project guidelines. These pillars needing to be so specific guided the rest of the areas design with regard to what kinds of rock surfaces we could find in the region. Currently we have a slate/basalt kind of consistency with a focus on darker colors to reinforce the idea of excessive moisture in the atmosphere.

Landscaping - While admittedly finding a landscape that works for my setting was challenging (and I will cover those issues later) designing and implementing said landscape was relatively intuitive as an experience. Once I was comfortable using the painting and sculpting tools, putting them to use was very straightforward and simple. Getting to utilize layers of different materials made a world of difference in making my neutral areas come to life. Since I already knew where I wanted to put everything, it became a simple matter of elbow grease in putting all the pieces where they belong.

Implementing the Idea - Once I knew what I wanted to have as my key set pieces, creating a level flow to go along with it was very easy. I definitely put in too much work during the blockmesh design process, but that gave me a very intricate template to iterate around as I encountered different challenges during Beta to Gold. Thanks to our detailed design guidelines I had just enough restriction to inspire ideas, without so many options that I was creatively unfocused.

Workflow Management - Luckily I’ve been able to manage my time around this project and what it’s needed fairly well. While I obviously would love more time to add more details and polish more, with the time I had available to me I managed to accomplish what I set out to do. My workflow enabled me to stay tuned in to many past habits that created certain issues for me later on in the design phases. I learned a lot about where I stumbled in my previous design work and I was able to use that in Beta to alleviate further issues.

What Went Wrong:

Optimizing asset migration - For asset migration I decided to migrate what I needed and replace the models one at a time at first. This worked pretty well in the beginning when I didn’t need so many diverse models unlike with foliage. Many meshes and materials relied on shared resource textures and albedos that would lose references whenever I would transfer say one kind of slate rock and when I transfer the next model it would need it’s materials all reassigned. Collision on my migrated assets has also been an issue that has required me to experiment with certain models, creating duplicates in attempts to mitigate the amorphous shapes of the collision volumes when scaled.

Landscape resolutions - So many high resolution packs… and even the lower resolution ones can just chew through the texture stream bandwidth. I ended up having to remove essentially half of my total landscape vista just to comply with texture streaming limitations. I tried several landscapes in test environments and I struggled to find one that worked well. Luckily enough for me, the landscape that was provided in the internal files for a temperate jungle forest floor worked very well for my setting, and with the added layers for puddles I can better illustrate the irrigation of certain area, such as the first pitfall in my level start.

Blockmesh too busy - My blockmesh, while good for illustrating a clear creative vision, was a mess to navigate around. It became very clear to me how unoptimized my placements of certain blocks were, and that at a certain point I stopped caring about polygon count. In Gold I don’t have that luxury, so a lot of assets had to be cleaned up and replaced. Working with mountainous regions and many different rock faces proved to be difficult when trying to replace key meshes, and that one cliff face could be anywhere from one to ten static block meshes.

Time - I never had a concrete schedule for working on certain areas or requirements. On one hand, it meant when I encountered issues and had to extend work sessions that I didn’t feel discouraged, but it also meant there was no accountability for where all my time went aside from my standups and changelists. While I’m largely a proponent of “It takes however long it takes.” I wish I did have a log of my work and how long each process took so I cna optimize it further in the future and better illustrate my problem points.

Technical Hurdles - Landscaping took three times longer than it needed because of technical issues forcing me to start from scratch each time. Replacing block meshes took longer than it should’ve just because of messier past work, and lighting took a couple days from my team alone just due to bugs after a build, forcing a revert. As I’ve mentioned before texture streaming was an issue for me. At first I thought it was due to foliage, so I changed LOD bias settings and removed meshes ending up with zero performance change to show for it. After deleting half of my landscape vista however I’ve encountered zero issues and the texture overload ceased.

Conclusion: In summary, a lot went right, and a lot went wrong. One thing is for sure I learned a lot more about myself and how to better make use of my time and energy in future projects. The issues I encountered gave me a glimpse at what can happen in the future when I’m not careful about how I solve certain problems or how I take accountability for myself and my work/time. Roughing out levels in blockmesh is a serene and almost spiritual experience as you're both viewing your ideas with your naked eye and the vision held in your imagination. Seeing it all come together in the final project was such an exciting experience. I was working on my level even more than I initially planned, because I enjoyed seeing it all come alive so much. Level design is a new passion of mine I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I have during my time here at FullSail. I’m proud of both mine, and my peers progress in our projects as we all develop further into better professionals and creatives.