Process

 

We start building the level by gray boxing the building and blueprinting the basic game mechanics which are counting down and picking up items. Then, we did some basic lighting. After that, we gradually started to art pass the biggest environment pieces like walls, streets and we eventually started to build the detail worlds which provide most of the narrative.

 

We started making the game function at the very start of our process, which gave us more space to explore possibilities and less work in the coming process since we don’t need to really change the mechanics when we art pass our level. This simple collection gives players a cheerful experience pushes them to wander around in this building, which is another cheerful thing to do, and we insisted it till the end of the project.

 

However, we did change a lot in our narrative design. At the beginning of the project, we wanted the narrative to be more casual and blur, so the players to just visit this place as in real life and enjoy the process of collecting. But when we started to art pass the level, we found it very hard to set up a realistic environment for players with no stories. We ended up creating a background story about this stealing. We carefully decorated all the places and using details to tell the players what happened in this place and what is happening right now. Following Mattias Worch and Harvey Smith mentioned in their narrative talk in GDC, “Environmental storytelling relies on the player to associate disparate elements and interpret as a meaningful whole.”, all the stories are hidden in the layers of the space and waited for players to find out.

 

Lighting is serving both the mechanic and the narrative. We used skylight, point light for most of the level, trying to create a combination of realistic decorations and really off light settings. At the same time, spotlights especially are used for guiding. As Robert Yang mentioned in his Level Design Workshop: How to Light a Level talk, important doors and narrative-related places are highlighted. We also use different colors of the lights to imply how emergent it is.

 

We almost modeled and textured all the 3D models in the game except for the surrounding buildings and some detailed furniture. In future work, we may keep modeling the third floor so players can go up and see the night scene of the level house. We may also iterate the UI layers to make it looks better.