B4Z-1L Research Facility Dev log 4

Hi,

My name is Justin I am in charge of the Art Direction of the project we are happy to announce that later today we will be able to release the game.

Furthermore, I would like to talk about the process of making the art of the game and how we overcome these challenges   we initially started with 4 people in group that we would divide the project into the programmers and designers I was in charge of the background and environment design, however, we were left with just 3 people in our group project.

We wanted to have different areas of the game we initially had 5 areas we wanted to explore but due to time constraint we had to cut the levels to just 3 levels.

the entire game is a tile based game using the grid format 258x258.

Level Design:

Our First level was a Cave Maze when I approach designing the cave was simple instead of using black or grey scaled tiles I used dark blue it is similar to the acrylic paint Ultramarine Blue it gives the environment a cold feeling to it and we also decided to reduce visible in the cave to feel that the player feels lost and uneasy playing this section of the game.

the Second level is the forest the approach is much different from the cave while using tilemap we've come across that the trees were difficult use a tilemap instead we use them as a normal image with box collider we had a lot of complication with this section as we have numerous iteration of the level and how much constraint we enforce on the level as players can simply pass through the level.

the Third Level original design was much larger and was last one before we decided to scrap the last two levels due to time constraint it is a lava level the original objective was to have the player to push around a box in a tight space and corners using numerous combination the player would successfully navigate through the exit, however, this later change, I made a box like model for the player as he is transformed when he entered this level and now has to slide through the level.

Lastly is the Facility Lab this was interesting as the room were originally larger but later reduce the size because of the player speed and the time limit the player has. this was the first level I design 

Character Design:

we made the Character design of the player simple as we had limited time before the playtest we made slight adjustments to the character after the playtest but overall kept the original look of the character since this was top down 2D game it was simple to rig the player sprites as I used Blend Tree to have the sprites react to the direction of the player is facing such as if the player is walking any direction the closes sprite either positive or negative on the axis will change the player sprite.

UI Design:

I was also in charge of the Menu screen and as well as the Game Over screen when the player clears the game as they were simple enough to code and design. the Game Over screen was fun to work at as they were simple animation Unity was able to do most of the work as didn't need to do animation frame by frame.

Overall, I had fun making the game with my group, we had a clear understanding of what kind of game we wanted to make from the start and which became our foundation during the process of making it, we had clear objectives, goals and we weren't afraid to make to difficult choices such as scrapping or changing parts of game from what we declared during our presentation to lecturer.

-Justin