Floors And More In Week Nine

   With the Easter break fast approaching I’ve been growing more aware of the amount of time that’s slipping through my fingers. Nearing the half way mark is helping to lend perspective with how I should be aligning my milestones for the project and I’m conscious of aiming to hit those. For me I want the level to be in a state where, while still remaining very rough, a player can experience the environment without myself intervening to explain something or telling the player what to do. In essence the level should be locked down design and asset-wise with all the core elements in unreal so that it's representative of the final experience. I hope that makes sense. 

   I feel on track to achieve that minus maybe one or two exceptions but in that broad sense of having an understandable playable experience, yeah I can hit that. The finalised aesthetic of the Command Module (ComMod) has definitely helped that as it’s come along but until this week, that is week nine, there’s been a major part missing, namely the floor. To me it’s been a tricky one of how to go about it, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted floor-wise in other areas of the level and up to this week there’s been a lot of spit balling ideas of how to go about it. While I initially wanted something modular keeping in line with how I’ve modelled pretty much everything in so far I began to move away from that requirement with the ComMod floor. What I felt was lacking was a unifying element in the space to help bring all the assets, the desk, the holo-table, the windows, together to make it a cohesive feeling room rather than a room full of various objects placed willy-nilly.  The other side of the proverbial coin of my struggle with the design is layering all the detail coherently into something that works though I was able to talk over my design approach with a buddy of mine mid-way through the week which helped a lot to push the final design through.

 

 

   For the design itself I took a lot of inspiration mercilessly and shamelessly riffed from one of the Star trek ’09 film sets and bashed in a number of cargo plane elements that I worked from for the corridor floor to create a cohesiveness between both designs. It took a while to get there but I feel with the final design I hit all those notes I’ve talked about and getting that in engine was a real moment of relief to see it pull the ComMod together. It really felt like watching the last piece of the puzzle slot in revealing the full picture but man was it a tricky one to get it to where it's at. Right now it's still really rough, I'm waiting on finalising the other modular assets before building the final floor around those. 

 

   Tying in to that sentiment of bringing the ComMod together I’ve also started to properly work on the lighting in the room and again this is something else that’s lacked a strong sense of what I want to do with it. Alongside that there’s also the additional layer of complexity dealing with the opening window which completely changes the lighting and mood of the space. Initially I thought I’d keep to a similar set-up to the corridors by keeping the key lighting underfoot however it was creating a very messy look that made the room feel too busy. I had a fairly large discussion with Mike on what direction to take with it, you know to put it bluntly I was pretty stumped about what to do. Talking it over with him and in the typical Mike fashion we reached a line of thought that as we fleshed it out and experimented I began to really warm to it. The idea was to use the holo-table as the key driver of the lighting in the first half of the ComMod leaving the remaining section in pre-dominate darkness lit by the monitor screens waiting for the vista reveal to light it fully. It’s still very early and wasn’t implemented in the screens that are in the post but by next week I should have a more refined lighting set-up to show you.

 

   The ComMod lighting is the first point I want to focus on going in to next week as well as concepting the remaining assets such as chairs and doors, pretty much what I’ve been doing the last few weeks. After that I’m home for just a little over a week and I’m not planning doing too much, maybe a little planning and feedback and possibly a cheeky blog post or two. Nothing too strenuous, as I said before it’ll be locking the design of the level so for before going home so after Easter I can focus on refining my assets for the final push before the final hand in.