Chrono Shift - Postmortem

The digital prototype for Chrono Shift has officially been completed. It has been an eventful 15 weeks, and I have learned a lot about the process of developing a prototype and working with teams to get it done on a schedule. I would say that the majority of the time throughout this development process that about 90% of it went well. My teammates and I maintained good communication with each other and all completed our necessary work on time. All the work we did was well implemented, with only occasional minor issues, most of which we were able to fix. Everyone did an equal amount of work and put a lot of effort into it, and I believe that you can see that by looking at the final result.

I personally didn't have too many issues when creating the levels for the game. Once I made the first two levels I got pretty well acquainted with ProBuilder and was able to use it to efficiently create unique geometry for the level when it was needed. It greatly quickened the pace of my work, as I didn't have to worry about model UV's, textures, or topology like I would when working in Maya or other software. This allowed me to quickly build up levels within Unity and immediately test and tweak anything that I needed too. I was able to build all five levels to a point that I was happy with, and I even had a little extra time to go through and twea some things after the fact. I would say that building the second level taught me the most, because it was my first time using geometry to build a level that is somewhat open and takes place outdoors. It was also one of the largest levels I've ever built so far, so I did my best to provide an interesting map that utilized the space well.

Throughout the building of all of my levels, my second highest focus besides the fun and functionality of each one was attempting to find a good balance between barebones functionality and immersion. My goal was to imagine what I would want the level to look like if it were a fully built level in a finished game, take that visual, and strip off its detail to find its fundamental shapes. I then used these shapes to integrate some level of visual interest in the level to help with player immersion, while not including anything that was unnecessary for the prototype. As an artistic person, this was a fun challenge that had me fight my instinct to fill the levels with theming and decoration, and I think I did a fairly good job of finding the right balance for the most part.

In terms of things that did not work or went wrong, there honestly is not much to discuss. There were minor issues, such as a disagreement of whether we should change the visual feedback system, or whether we should include certain objects in the level, but overall we were able to come to an agreement on each issue that was raised and continue moving forward as a team. I only had to go back and fix something that got a bit broken one time, but it was more of a misunderstanding than anything. It was simply just that one of my teammates was unfamiliar with ProBuilder, so when changing a small area of the map on one level they interfered with how I had arranged it, so I helped them and fixed some of the geometry. If anything, I take it a lesson that if I ever don't understand something or need help that it's better and saves time if I ask a teammate to help me.

Throughout the last sprint of the development process I worked on building the fourth level that was based around our gliding mechanic. We decided that it would be based on the characteristics of a vampire, so my idea for the level was to have the player navigate through a vampire's castle. I already knew about the "real" Dracula's castle in Romania, called Bran Castle, so I decided to use that as a reference. I found a picture that detailed some of it's layout, and used it to create a pathway for the level that weaved throughout rooms of the castle.

Bran Castle in Romania

My annotated map for the fourth level of Chrono Shift

Every level I made previously was always outdoors, so it was harder to create a coherent path working on an indoor level with lots of enclosed rooms. To help myself create each room, I first drew their approximate shapes and sizes outside of the annotated map, and then used these as templates to begin building in Unity. I then took these built shapes and placed them in the layout I drew, sort of like a 3d puzzle. Once I had the platforms that the player would be walking on into a layout that I was happy with, I built interior walls for each one, as well as doorways. Once these were done, I added ceilings, and probably the most difficult part, adding exterior walls. These were the most challenging as I had to keep them walls aligned with their interior counterparts while covering all of the objects within the castle. It was a bit tricky in some places to avoid the walls from cutting through pieces within the castle, but ProBuilder greatly helped once again and I was able to split walls into sections and adjust individual faces and edges to a point I was happy with.

Overall, I'm very happy with how the prototype turned out. I think that the levels I made turned out quite good considering my low level of experience. The mechanics that my teammates worked on feel good to use, especially the grappling mechanic in my opinion, and the overall look of the game is pretty cool. I'm proud of how well we worked as a team and I think we were able to create a really good final product this semester.