Setting the Scene. . .

So now the hotel has been structured with working doors etc, it's time I focus on the players progression of the 'level'. I've drafted up a level plan of the hotel with corresponding colours indicating details for the ground floor.

This is a top view of the ground floor, with coloured dots representing the lighting of the level. The green dots  mean functioning lights, and areas of the hotel where the player can clearly see their surroundings. The orange  dots represent broken lights, so a flickering effect will be added, only providing limited lighting at best. Mike Birkheads reading on gamasutra and one of my dissertation resource references mentions that 

"Unsettling — "Should not be so" — Moving shadows on a wall, children that know too much, the Brundlefly, Wolfmen, objects moving on their own, flickering lights, distorted humanity". Flickering lights is a good way to build on the atmosphere and he also mentions moving shadows. Implementing these will act as good 'scene setters' without necessarily being jump scares.

The red dots stand for absolute darkness. The players torch will be their only means of exploring the hotel.

The white circles with the numbers express the progression of the notes the player needs to pick up. Again this correlates with the lights, as the last room the player must enter is in the 'dingiest' part of the hotel, and in complete blackness. This is to build tension as the player explores.

The fuzzy blue lines represent where 'scare' events will happen. People running past in the corridors, horrendous images screaming their way towards the player or even damage inflicting run ins with ghostly apparitions. As the sprint draws to a close, I will continue to polish up and finalise these areas to prepare the hotel for a makeover with textures, the proposed lights and particle effects. 

Coming Together. . .

Hello everyone! After a bit of trial and error I have managed to 'successfully' figure out the Arcadian ground floor situation. I spent some time making the necessary prefabs out of planes in unity, adjusting the horizontal and vertical scales to make realistic and proportionate corridors, corners etc. It was only after I made them all and put the hotel together that I decided to try and test out the texture situation. To my absolute horror, I hadn't considered how stretching the planes would stretch the textures also. This led to some rather crude cursing and the realisation I would have to re make all the prefabs and create the hotel again. 

So.

Second attempt has sorted the problem, as I've just used a few more planes rather than changing their scales. This means that any seamless textures I use on the floors and walls will blend nicely. 

It's rather frustrating that this was a much quicker way of 'modelling' the interior, but lessons have definitely been learned and it now means I'm actually ahead of schedule. I just have to work on the reception area now, fit in the doors and I can get a headstart on the textures before the next sprint!

Here's a couple of screens of the prefabs and the hotel, which I have slightly expanded to add more rooms and make the level even more 'maze' like. Enjoy!

 

Certainly No Premier Inn. . .

So after trying to model some more of the Arcadian ground floor, I have found myself running into several technical hitches. It was going well at first, save a few geometry issues. For some reason though, the walls of the hotel were not interacting with light correctly. In 3DS Max, these show up as planes with a black to white gradient (why, I have no idea. . .) and after importing the hotel into Unity, the player can directly see this problem with the flashlight. Obviously this is a huge problem as lighting is a key element in setting up an authentic and unsettling atmosphere, which is not being helped by walls showing up as pitch black. Here are some screenshots to illustrate my problem. . .

This is not acceptable in the scene I am trying to create, and puts me in a difficult position. It is not an easy fix, but the more I work on it, the more 'dodgy' planes seem to occur. Clearly something has gone belly up somewhere down the line, and I am now contemplating using another method to model this ground floor. It was a method Scott and I were using in our group project, using simple planes and organising them into tunnel shapes we needed before making them into prefabs. As the hotel is quite linear in it's design, I would only have to make 3 - 4 prefabs I imagine, but then I could slot them together such as in Tetris. A prefab for the corner parts, a prefab for the longer corridor sections and so on. This would somewhat limit how the textures come out but it might speed things up in the long run, with a deadline to keep and all. I will start making some prefabs, and should be able to tell quite quickly whether or not this is a suitable substitute. Areas such as the reception area can still be made in 3DS Max, but as the reception area is not integral to the horror setting as such, I am approaching that as a lower priority model until I can organise the bare bones of the level which is of course the hotel corridors, where the player will be interacting in the most.

Plodding on. . .

So! I haven't blogged in an awfully long time and should update everyone on what's been happening. Over the Christmas break my internet was travelling at the speed of fog, leaving me physically unable to blog, e-mail, the works. It set a lot of work back and then when I got back to Ipswich I had just fallen out of the habit. Anyway! As work goes, I have been working on modelling the new Arcadian interior, mentioned in the last post. Integrating the code from the previously referenced videos into the level itself and setting up the environment. It's going well, I've already had my first jump scare from a playtester which made me incredibly happy, as it has proven to me that I'm on the right track. This is at a greybox stage as well, no textures or anything particularly fancy.
We recently had a presentation to tutors explaining the current stage of the dissertation, and Chris mentioned specifically that the lighting was too dark. He offered some really helpful, constructive advice about using lights in certain areas, and putting player goals in darker areas to balance the use of the flashlight in game for players. There's enough to be going on with so here is a revised look at the original timetable so I can better manage my time and aims for the rest of the project.

Sprint 4: February 2013

This sprint will be used to focus on finishing the Arcadian interior (ground floor). This means the reception desk, rooms and working doors will be all implemented and working in game. Depending on the method of modelling some areas of the ground floor may be textured, but that might be a tall order.

Sprint 5: March 2013

With the ground floor finished I will finish texturing it completely. This will mean that the entire 'level' is detailed, painted and up to standard. I will also implement lights and particle effects into the scene to add to the atmosphere.

Sprint 6: April 2013

With the bones of the level set and textured, I will use this sprint to model the smaller assets and 'pad out' the rooms and corridors with chairs, debris, bed, lights, lamps, tables, wardrobes etc. These will be easy enough to churn out which is why I'm leaving them until the 6th sprint as low priority assets.

This is a basic re-vamp of what I plan to achieve, which I made add to if I run into any bumps. Certainly closer to the end of the February sprint I'll know if these are realistic goals!