3D Assets/Modelling
Game assets
These are the assets required to complete my prototype level.
-Floor and wall tiles (Bottom, bottom left/right, side left/right)
-Temple wall tiles + wall edge
-Altar
-Player model Lily
-Thistle ball
-Seed shooter
-Stalactites (Big and small)
Modelling
All of the 3D assets used in my game have been produced by me in Blender. I decided to use Blender over Maya as I had been using it in my previous year during my placement and currently feel more proficient with it.
Enemies
To date I have modelled the thistle ball (Figure 1) and seed shooter (Figure 2) enemies and I am unlikely to produce any other enemies for now until these are properly implemented and tested.
The Level has been designed with these two enemies in mind, one stationary and one mobile, but may be changed if new enemies are introduced.
Environment
To come up with ideas for the environment I drew a basic image of the area that Lily would enter into and developed a level design and models from that as a reference (Figure 3).
Level progression
My intention is to have the level progress in a way that will naturally teach the player how to move, navigate the level and attack enemies. This is done by putting in natural stopping points that can only be passed by using the new abilities they’ve gained such as needing to attack stalactites to pass.
For example one section at the beginning can only be passed by jumping across platforms as well as a tunnel that requires stalagmites to be broken to continue. If all goes well, the structure in the top right will trap the player, forcing them to kill all of the enemies to progress.
Looking at figure 4 I’ve marked where the spiked enemies spawn from using red arrows and spiked balls. I’ve also shown where the seed shooters spawn, depicted as a red circle with roots at the bottom and seeds at the top.
Creating the ancient walls for the level I used inspiration from Mayan architecture as seen in previous posts to explore some different designs (Figure 5) then taking bits from each, settled on the design below (Figure 6).
To make sure the tiles all lined up and were proportionally correct I used Blender’s incremental snapping to have everything the right length. To make sure the object pivots were in the right place I modelled everything together to make sure they lined up.
While my game is still technically 2.5D in the sense that the player moves on a 2D axis in a 3D world I would like to expand into the background, having a large crevice and other environmental assets such as waterfalls and other ancient structures that hint to other areas in the game. This wasn’t easy to do with the tiled system I was using but I did attempt it in a few key areas such as the area the player starts at and the altar.
Figure 7 shows small and large stalactites that will be able to be destroyed by the player. The large one was created by rotating, resizing and reusing parts of the smaller one.
Prefabs
To create the environment I took each of the tiles I modelled and added box colliders to them, making sure to use specific units so that each of the tiles lined up properly then saved them as prefabs. I also have made a prefab for the thistle ball enemy to make prototyping faster.
Using prefabs means you don’t have to set up colliders and scripts for each object and can instead just drag a premade prefab into a scene.
Prism Altar
I went through a few different designs for the Prism Altar trying out different shapes and designs with the prism being the centre piece (Figures 8 and 9).
Each altar will produce a different colour when activated, shining the light through a coloured prism. The final design has four lights shining from each of the ‘arms’ of the altar as seen in figure 10.
Angel statue
With the angel design (Figure 11) I tried to think of a way to show player progression within the world. Activating the altars shoot light into the prism, lighting up the feathers with a range of colours to give her rainbow wings.
