Scopophobia Group Page Weekly Communication
I tried to design it to visually communicate to the player where they’d next need to go everytime they reach a visible desitnation.
I realised after making these toilets & graybox maps that they shouldn’t be made this way as they were not modular nor flexible. My approach here is flawed in that it severely inconveninces my teammates working predominantly in UE5 too due to its ‘all in one’ format.
My team’s technical designer, Yushan, was unable to import my graybox due to my inexperience with the Blender-UE5 pipeline. She roughly recreated it in UE5 for the playtest.
I realised I should switch to using modular pieces so it may be easily edited in UE5 if any factors arise which demand so. Here I duplicated assets in Blender and bloated the UE5 project, adding unnecessarily to file size and confusing my teammate in UE5.
On Thursday, we had the playtest. Although Yushan recreated my level layout in UE5, I was unable to test my design fully as she misunderstood the intent of my layout. This is not her fault, as the level designer, I should’ve been the one who made it. At this point, I thought I could so everything in Blender, in my own PC, and push everything UE5 related to our programmer Yushan. After this experience, I now fully understand my responsibilities as the level designer.
After the playtest, since I was the one taking notes, I summarised everything into neat bulletpoints for my teammates.
I also manually translated it all into simplified chinese so there’s zero possibility translation error, I do not know simplified Chinese but I do know traditional Chinese, which is identical to simplified in all but aesthetics. I manually translated everything into traditional Chinese then used Google Translate to go from traditional to simplified, which is a 1:1 so there’s no possibility of translation error.
In the book Developing Creative Content for Games, I found a quote I really liked, so much so I was able to apply it to remember and quote it in the context of a gaming Youtuber getting annoyed at the co-op game Helldivers 2 ‘s design of AI enemies.
“Keep the players engaged with frequent short bursts of intensity, though don’t overdo it and have nothing but a constant stream of action. Nonstop activity is a recipe for player fatigue. The key is to find a balance and provide a set of highs and lows in the story. The player will need time to rest and take a break from frenetic activity just as much as they will want to have periods of excitement. You have to keep your players engaged and immersed while not making the game dull or overtaxing.” (Johnson, G. 2019. 86.)
I also returned Developing Creative Content for Games (2019)to WSA library this week.
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