Chrono Shift - Prototype Sprint 2

For this sprint, my team and I began the process of switching gears from physical to digital development of this prototype. We formed a Trello board, created a backlog, and started assigning cards to each member. The meetings we have had so far have gone very smooth, usually if anyone does have any issues it's a mutual concern and it's easily discussed between the three of us. While the programmer and producer got to work on the character controller and other programming related tasks, I began to work on creating an annotated map for the very first level of the game that would serve as a tutorial for the player. Since the story for the game is about an average person who gains abilities from discovering an object, I wanted the first level to take place before they find it.

I designed it based off of the area I grew up in San Jose, where there was a large suburban area with parks and commercial buildings on the outer areas of it. I started the player in a cul de sac, and had them make their way out of the neighborhood to their job's building. I wanted to give the player options and make them feel in control of their path, so I made the map have multiple routes the player could take that would let them end up at the goal. I added pits in the concrete strewn throughout the level that the player has to jump over, as well as cars placed throughout as obstacles. I also added in some optional collectables to add motivation for the player to explore the entirety of the level to find all of the secrets. I'm very happy with how the map turned out, and I subsequently used this map as an imported sprite within Unity as a guideline to build the level off of.

Building the level inside of Unity was pretty simple with the guideline map in place. I created a lot of my shapes using Unity's built-in probuilder plugin, which greatly helps to expedite the process of doing simple modelling. In my last project, I made every custom model in Maya, so it took a lot longer to create the model, add UV's, export it, and then import it into Unity. Plus, if I had to make any adjustments I had to go back into Maya to do so, then redo the UV, re-export and import it again. It was much easier using probuilder, as I can make all of the models within the engine and I don't have to worry about UV's or exporting/importing my models. On top of that, I can edit them whenever I want the same way that I can for basic 3D objects in Unity. Using this, I added in all of the custom pathways, buildings, fences, etc. to build up the level.

I did make some adjustments, like adding a sidewalk between the pathway and buildings to make it look more natural and make it easier to create a seamless transition from floor to buildings. I also created some simple tree variants and quickly littered them around the edges of the level at random to make it feel a little more immersive and keep the player from seeing the edge of the map. Lastly, I added in a custom skybox that I made for my previous project. Overall, I am very happy with how the level came out and it took much less time to create now that I have a better workflow and tools to improve my efficiency. I think I did a pretty good job balancing the need for simplicity, while conveying the general theming of the area well enough to the player.