This week we started making the first level and implementing the mechanisms.
We managed to finish the environment of the first level and planned the route where the players will be following along in the scene.
Level Design and Environment
The players will be traveling in a submarine through an underwater landscape and their mission is to clean up contaminated corals.
We use placed a spline in the map and used it as the route which players will be traveling on, and we fine-tuned the speed of each section to make sure the movement speed and rotational speed are not too fast to cause motion sickness to our players.
Here is a video of a walkthrough of the environment. Our goal is to build a vivid underwater scene with existing assets. Besides the rocks and corals, we used a particle system to simulate swarms of fish and bubbles. Having moving objects in the scene definitely helps with attracting the players’ attention.
We also finished the shooting and flashlight mechanics and implemented them into a test level for playtest purposes. In this level, we will be testing our shooting and flashlight mechanisms. Our goal is to find out whether our mechanism is intuitive enough, and whether it is too hard or too easy for our players, considering they are playing in a brand-new setting.
We have drafted the playtest questionnaire and plan to operate our first playtest next week. We drafted the questionnaire based on the information we want to get. We asked questions about motion sickness, and the shooting mechanisms, and we also added some open-ended questions to find out what experience our player want to have in the CAVERN setting. We hope to validate some of our ideas and get inspiration from our players.
