Extended Practice Hub World and Assets Concept Art and Testing

I then took the layouts that Sophie had created and used the mood boards that I had put together to start creating a bit of concept art that we could use as reference when creating the hub world itself later on in the project. I wanted to try and capture a beautiful and calm atmosphere throughout and ensure that it provokes peaceful emotions, to show that it can be a serenity when they are not under pressure from the badgers.

After creating my concept art I had a basic idea of what the level was going to look like and how everything was going to be laid out, so wanted to take it into Maya and Unity and test that I could link all of the worlds together and also get the hub world being the correct size. As the design was to make it in a huge tree, I first took the basic shape and modeled the different platforms that would be located up the middle of the tree trunk and the staircase that goes up to the next level.

I then added in the branching platforms where the portals would be located at the end of the 'branches' which would be modeled to look more like them later on in the process. The level was definitely starting to take shape by now.

The last thing I added was the cubes for where the portals would be going to be able to use this to test that they work and take you to the correct place. I then took it into Unity to be able to test the level. I first looked at how big everything was in terms of the character and found that it was all too big so I ended up scaling everything down to an appropriate size before writing out my Load Level scripts in Java. I had previously looked at creating these in my last project so it was fairly simple to adapt them for this one, and I was able to create links from the portals to the other game levels set in Egypt and India.

Below I then did a quick walk through to show the transitions between each level and how the level will load. We actually found at this stage that the level loads almost instantly, something that is perhaps a little bit too fast so we may need to think about adding in a loading screen just to slow the game play down between levels slightly, but this will be something that is very quick. Overall I am very happy with the final transitions between the levels and the scripts work exceptionally well, the next stage now will be to actually creating the character and environment and bringing everything together fully.