Week 10 Reflection

Written by

yfw1e23

Year2Sem2 Weekly Reflections

Scopophobia Group Page Weekly Communication

We had our public playtest on Thursday this week. Next in terms of importance were the items the player collects.

I used a similar workflow, here I put all the objects’ UVs onto a single texture/material.

For a sliding door, I just reused the fridge material due to the time contraints of the coming playtest.

The day before the playtest, I made a two barriers, a non interactable shopping cart and a caution sign, to restrict player access to areas yet allow them to see through to the other side. I also made a checkout machine and a shopping cart for players to push around and put collected items in. The players’ shopping cart is textured to be brighter and more eye-catching, while the barrier shopping cart is more dull.

The shopping cart system is actually a compromise between me and technical designer & programmer Yushan. We communicated poorly before week 8, thus Yushan made a system where the players could carry collectable items physically, as in the item could literally be picked up and thrown around, whereas I thought we would just make an inventory system where collected items would just disappear when interacted with and be ‘collected’ in a more video game way.

It was made appearant in the week 8 playtest that players having the physically pick up every item to the checkout from across the map wouldn’t be fun for players as they’d have to go back and fourth repetitively. The compromise was that she would make physics based inventory system in the form of the shopping cart

The checkout machine is one of the few places where I tried to do my original vision of having a scopophobia inducing environment, with the camera at the top looming over players with a creepy eye.

If I had more time, I’d have done this more in other places, but my time management left a lot to be desired for this project.

Over this week before Thursday, me and Yushan started making the ‘final iteration’ of the level’s layout in UE5. We followed this map I made for the previous playtest and adapted it using the incremental assets I finished the previous week.