Alonso's Development Blog

     This week I helped with polishing up the maze map with Chance. Chance mainly handled the lighting and props, and I did what I've done in the past few maps and populated this map with enemies. I tried to make it a little bit more perilous than the other maps since this is our final level, so a lot of the rooms have close-quarters combat with Elite enemies or generally just hoards of enemies. Although I didn't put too many enemies around since I didn't want to overwhelm the player.    Other than enemy population I also did some refining around the map. I noticed a few walls and ceilings had openings between the cracks that didn't seem intentional, so I sealed those up where I could. I'm not sure if I found them all but I did it to the most noticeable cracks that stuck out to me while roaming around the level. So I'd count that as something.    Lastly I added invisible walls to the railings to players wouldn't be able to jump into the maze and ignore...

     This week was a pretty fun week. I had been put on a task with Blake and Chance to finalize our second map. In this case it meant adding in props and lighting, alongside putting in more enemies and ores. I took up populating the map with more enemies and ores which was in itself a rather lengthy thing to do. As in it took me a good few hours to actually accomplish.    The first thing I did was the ore population. I made prefabs for the individual ores that were not already created. Then I proceeded to sprinkle them around every place I possible could for the map. The starting area has a pretty high ore density, although I put in a few more Emeralds than usual since the first altar would account for them and it'd be needed. The hardest section would probably have to have been the bottomless pit though. There's a lot of area to cover and a lot of possible ore spots. Although I decided to make each of the major outcroppings feature specific ores, with elite en...

     This week I was tasked with helping Rebekah handle the main menu. Admittedly there weren't a lot of tasks this week that I felt like I could really do so the main menu design task seemed like the one of the bunch that I was most familiar with. Especially since Michael and Blake had some specifications regarding how they wanted our main menu to be.    Rebekah and I split our task between actually designing the main menu, and then implementing those design concepts into the game itself. I handled the design portion of it, which mainly just involved making a bunch of mock-ups of potential main menu ideas. Generally most of the mock ups were fairly similar, giving potential ideas for different layouts regarding either two or three button styles.    The biggest thing I wanted to find focus on was the background. Both Michael and Blake mentioned wanting a background that was 3D and showcased the world a little bit. To me this immediately brought to mind...

     This week I was actually able to achieve what I was planning on doing last week. That is to say I aided with finishing up our initial plan for the second map but adding in major scripts that weren't added by the other two. This mainly just meant adding scripts to the ores, which there surprisingly weren't many of. Although I brought that up with Blake and he said we'll add the rest of the ores later when we decide to decorate the map.    After the scripts were added I also populated the area with more altars. This map will have four altars instead of three, and I tried to make the placement of each altar a bit meaningful here. The movement altar is located in the first area which had a lot of platforming, the health altar is in the enemy heavy bottomless pit, the shield altar is before you go into the cramped enemy filled sewers, and the weapon upgrade altar is hidden in the sewer due to the fact that it's the most powerful of all the altars. I just thought...