Context of Practice 3: Finalising the Environment

After getting the feedback from the questions that I gave out to the students and tutors at York College, I wanted to continue looking at the environment to improve it further as I had a lot of time left to improve any key details. I started again by adjusting the lights and snow slightly, something that continuously gets changed throughout the entire process.

 I then looked at adding in some camera image effects and looked at adding in a depth of field, which I altered in order to make the background look slightly blurrier than the foreground, giving a sense of distance in the scene. I then added a vignette around the first person camera as well to be able to make the edges appear darker and limiting the players view around the whole level.

I then looked at making the torch better, adding in an image effect that came with Unity to make the torch appear in more rings instead of just a solid light. I looked at some torch lights to see how they looked and wanted this to appear very old and worn and almost about to die, but at the same time it is still your guide, lighting the way through the level.

I then also decided to bring the houses down the ridge slightly so that they could be visible from the pathway, just to give a sense of scale to the level and make it seem that at some time people did live there.

I finished editing the vault and the inside of it before adding it into the game level. I also looked at adding a spot light onto the crystals at the front to brighten them up slightly and make them glow blue.

The light looked great from far away, but when you got closer, it flickered and there was a strange element of light on the terrain in the background which I couldn't understand why so I went back and looked at it in a little bit to try and figure out why it was disappearing.

I managed to fix this by making the range of the light a lot shorter and also after moving some of the terrain around so it wasn't reflected as much onto it. and without the torch underneath is the effect that it creates, which does look nice.

I then started creating some rocks and and extra details to go into the environment to add extra textures and make it come to life more. I wanted these icy looking elements to come into play to make it seem that there could have once been a vast winter that still creates problems even today. I decided to make a few different types of rocks so that there would be a lot of variety in the environment.

The rocks look nice when added in a long with the ambient lighting to darken them more. They definitely add more textures into the world and make the environment that little bit more detailed.

I then looked at adding in some more textures onto the ground as well and really thought that the path looked a little bit too plain and boring so I decided to add in these tire tracks which where just added using the paint effects on the terrain. As the level is set after a war and the survival of the world is not totally known the idea that there are tracks leading to nowhere, I thought, added to the eerie atmosphere that was already present.

I then added in a fence as again the path down to the vault was just a little boring. This gave it a bit more character and the broken feel of it makes it look old and worn, like how it would look if it was constantly been battered by blizzards.

I then finished up by adding some grass around the bottom of the fence, just peaking through the top of the snow where I thought the grass would have grown a little taller than in older places.

I then did another walk through of the environment before I went any further so I could look at the progress so far, and I was very happy with the look so far. The whole environment is shaping up nicely and there are some definite themes of coldness running with the colour scheme which I am happy with. There are now only a few more adjustments that I want to make to finalise the overall look and this includes adding in sounds and making it so that you can go inside the vault.

 

I moved onto adding in some invisible walls around the vault as for some reason my mesh colliders where not working, but this wasn't too much of an issue as the vault does have straight walls.

I then just altered the torch slightly so that it was a little brighter.

I then moved onto looking at how I could animate the door to open so that as the player got near it, it would open on its own, again adding to the spooky atmosphere.

Then talk about creating the animation for the door so that it could swing open when the player gets near and then closes when they walk through it. This did make me have quite a few issue and I believe I must have clicked on something by accident at some point as it was not wanting to work at all. Luckily I got some help from Steve who had previously been helping us with scripting and this was very informative as he really helped me to get my doors working well and when the player reached them.

I then looked at adding in some audio for the doors so that when they open and closed they made a heavy metal door sound, which worked well. I used this simple script below to be able to add the sound and this addition really makes the door feel very heavy and weighty.

 After adding the animation onto the door I then moved onto adding sound into the whole scene, this was fairly difficult in some places as there were some elements of sound that I wanted to follow the player as they moved, like footsteps. But I started with adding in an ambient sound of arctic wind that I got on YouTube, that isn't my own and I do not own any of the rights, and added this to an empty game object and made it a 2D sound so that it would travel around the entire environment.

I then looked at adding in footsteps which took me a long time to figure out. First of all I found the right soundtrack of footsteps walking in the snow that I really liked and then sought out the help of Annabeth, one of my tutors, to create a script that would play the sound, but only when the character was walking. The script is great and works brilliantly. I used Audacity to break up the footsteps and created four different files of sounds which then was placed into the script so that when the character makes a step it picks randomly out of the four sounds to add dynamic sound effects to the scene.

I then created a script that took the player from one scene to the next, this was going to be used to end my game level and take the player off the game. This was fairly easy to create and the script is below, I wanted the script to be able to take the player away from that level and into one that had the end level screen, saying that the demo was over.

Then I wanted the application to quite after 5 seconds so I created another script and applied it in the other scene. As I wasn't in a build I added in a debug text to show after 5 seconds which did work which I was very happy with.

I then wanted to actually create my end screen so moved onto looking at a style that I would be happy with for that. I wanted to go with a fairly dark theme, so decided to just go with black with white writing and keep it fairly simple.

Before finishing I wanted to create a script that would allow the player to escape the level by pressing the ESC key as well just in case they didn't get to the end, this again was fairly easy to add in, but adds a lot to be able to exit a game - something I haven't added before.

 Below is a final look at the end of the environment and how the player can use firstly the ESC key to be able to get off a level and then secondly get to the end of the level and go inside the vault before the game level ends, takes you to the next screen, and after five seconds, the game application ends, making the process of exiting the game really easy.