I continue with easy, but time-consuming work of getting the area ready for gameplay.
While I was testing the area for lighting, I thought that so many secondary rooms are empty, and since the game is explorational, I must place there something interesting to see. So what I decided to do is to create many simple animations of cubes, doing their fun stuff as habitants of this weird place. I was inspires with NaissanceE (one of my initial references), which had cube-like creatures that were afraid of light. I liked the concept for its simplicity and started to place cubes doing stuff over the empty areas. I crrated them quite randomly, without any particular plan in mind. Some examples:
Apart from cubes, I also made some “weird spaces”, with just some unknown objects, some of which work as landmarks:
Apart from that there was a bunch of small works, that were fast to complete, and I don’t think they’re worth much attention to describe. I’ll just list them here:
- Remove doors from area 1 (which were placed just for the purpose of first playtest)
- Remove trigger texts (the ones “area under construction”)
- Change material of keys to match panels
- Change sector signs under main door panels
- Attach puzzle 1 to the door with square symbol (previously it was attached to the 2 doors blocking the way to half of area 1)
- Animate the rest of the elevators (like in area 1)
So, basically those were some touch-ups to blend area 1 and area 2 as well as fixing some of the issues of playtest 2. For example, I connected keys with main door more, so that player will get feedback on their actions. Now it has a cutscene that indicates players action and progress:
Among other works:
- animate the rest of elevators and set triggers for them
- Create an intro cutscene (I felt there’s a need in one, and I tried to merge it with some sort of instructions. I showed that lights form a pathway, what objects to find and the game goal – which is to open the door)
- Set up trigger button to door to puzzle 2:
There was nothing new or complicated, I reused the same scripts and mechanics as for the opening of the door after puzzle 1. I just wanted to highlight the brilliantly easy code I came across for triggering any animation from any object without the need to spend time on setting transitions and booleans to trigger by writing in the code. The only thing you need is to attach the object with desired animator and write the name on animation
For now I consider the area as ready, and I proceed to creating puzzle 2, which gives access to key of the square sector