Final major project directly continues the thesis topic and is devoted to implementing proposed theoretical model of LL navigation system.
The thesis offers an alternative light&landmark based navigation system for brutalist-like environmments in contrast with signage and mapping system of Control, which causes significant navigation issues provoked by pecularities of brutalist style: repetitiveness, visibility and complexity.
Breefly, LL System is based of the following principles:
Light as the main navigation tool
Light forms landmark patterns or is combined with architectural landmarks:
Light forms 2 types of navigation: global and local. Global is formed of key or fill lighting (depending on situation) of a particular pattern, assigned to a specific area. Local activates in complex rooms, where an action must be taken. Global lighting is deactivated not to interfere with local lighting.
Game genre
I see the game as a walking simulator genre because the main idea of the project is to test my manvigation system. But in order to make the game more like a game, but not a navigation test, some entertaining elements must be added. I see 2 options: a story or some puzzle element. The main point is that player will need to orient themselves in order to get to some key waypoints and reach final destination.
There’s a concern about split screen which was one of the first ideas about the project. Split screen will allow to compare 2 navigation systems: Control-like and my system. In case of a split screen, ideally it should resemble Medium, where pathways appear on another screen in spirit world.
This will clearly demonstrate how my system makes pathways more evident. But I’m not sure about my capabilities to implement that technically.
Another option is to make 2 runs with different navigation, but that has familiarity issue, when player will get more familiar with the environment during the second run, which will make navigating easier despite the system. So I wouldn’t opt for that.
Map
Within thesis I’ve developed a Control-like map, which I’ve designed to imitate the 3 legibility issues of the environment.
Player will have a task to get to the ground floor, solve a puzzle (or get further instrustructions) and get back to the start to exit the level. In order to make navigation task more challenging, some of the fastest pathways will be blocked, what will tell the player to look for another pathways depending on navigation hints. The blocks will be placed in such a way that player will have to pass through all 3 test areas before finishing the game. That will allow to check navigation effectiveness in all of the 3 issues.
Visuals and inspirations
Visually I see the game similar to Fugue in Void and Naissancee wich combine simplicity and specularityof brutalist architecture.
This is the bare visual minimun to make brutalist environment work and won’t require much texturing. Also due to geometric forms this will allow low amount of polygons and relatively easy modeling. Also this will exaggerate repetitiveness even more wich is benefitial in our case as it will perform additional testing to the system.
Technicalities and further work
Currently I’m on stage to choose the game form, which requires some technical research. Ideally I see it as a 3D game, but I never made one in unity. So that will require modelling and importing models to Unity. As far as my research shows, levels are usually modelled in Blender and then expoirted to Unity. Same concerns lighting, which is key for this project. So my goal for now is to make a basic test level with a couple of rooms and stairs with lighting in Blender (which is also new for me) and try out how it works in Unity and if I’ll be able to make player succesfully move in that environment. If that’s succesfull, I can implement the map and focus on lighting navigation. So, basically the speed and form of the project depends on this key step as I’m still not as experienced with Unity.