Innovative Digital Design To Intrigue The Senses.

Well After endless meetings with the group and discussion idea development we have put together our final guy in brief began design document.

now we have started creating our models in blender and making our ideas into visual concepts.

We have all been assigned certain jobs and duties, mine is to develop the map and imagery concept for that.

I am drafting up models and maps in sketch format.

I am making mock up models 3-D in blender of the whole map (the island) and I am using terrain elements in unity to create the 3-D sketch up of what i think the Map of the island should look like.

The famous interaction design firm Ideo describes their intense collaborative process of tackling a design problem as “The Deep Dive”. This project will be a Deep Dive – examining the status quo in game design – and meditating on how to break away from these trends while charting new territory. Ultimately this brief examines professional game design, from well-known companies in the industry, to experimental Indy games and serious games, and finds this activity is 100% a group-work activity. Much of this is due to the division of labour and the creative benefits of developing ideas within a team dynamic. Capitalizing on these same strengths, while also providing a professional model of instruction, this final project will have students work in groups. Students are asked to creatively extend some aspect of current day game design: story, game-play, level design, social interaction, and user interaction design.

http://magnusmax.com/solveme.unityweb.html

The game is here click on the picture to enter the SolveMe World

Here is my final stages for setting up my level

this is me working in blender during tis project

I have been thinking about my level and will show my thought process and developments here. I have created in blender a house, a rocky cliff, a dam, a table and a chair . These 3d elements will be added to my level in unity which will all be arranged as shown in the sketches below.The path thought my level will begin on the roof of the piece of architecture i have created (remembering that my game is a puzzling quest) . To get of the roof you will have to shoot a rock of the cliff above to smash through the roof of the house you are on once in the house you need to run around on the top level until you find a table to jump on which will smash and break the floor below it once on the next level down you need to blast your way though the floor by blowing up some gas cylinders and once in the bottom floor and garage you need to take the brake of in the car and let it role through the garage door to smash it and allow you to et out once out you need to cross the river but to do so you need to open the dam to let all the water out once that is completed you get trapped on the other side and eventually die trying to find your way out and hence have to restart.

While developing my level I found that I wanted AI/ bots within my level. One problem here was the fact that the bots I was using would just be getting stuck in areas or impaled on my 3-D meshes because they were walking in the wrong direction and following the wrong area markers. It took me some research focusing on the unity forums asking Doug and My classmates and searching through lots of code within the unity to finally find out that the way to seat the AI/Bots movement orientations and limits, is to put in waypoints to set the area that the AI/bot will move within. Setting out the waypoints allowed me to very precisely set the area that the bots will move within.

While working in Unity during this week I found the F Key to be extremely important and helpful to me, especially when locating items (mainly meshes) within my level, or if I was just simply trying to place a character or mesh in a very accurate position. The F Key would constantly help me to take me to and get me into a right camera angle so that I can line up each mesh to the exact position on the level to where I wanted it place.

Beginning my work in Unity 3-D I had big problems with navigation. It wasn’t until both Steven and Sam indicated to me, how all to control the navigation with a combination of mouse click control. Control right mouse click (rotate camera), Control left mouse click (zoom camera) and the centre mouse wheel (up and down and sideward movement) would all help me to manage my environment. Once knowing what this can do my navigation within Unity 3-D was amazing and I was able to zoom in or get very close to every position and place every object extremely well.

I will put up some sketches of my level layout and a plan of attack process tree here