Week 2

Understanding the brief 

After speaking to the lecturers on Friday, I now know that the brief is more about creating a DLC/level for an existing game rather than creating a level set in our own fiction. I will now be researching more into the level design style in HL2 and the fiction surrounding the game so that I can get a better understanding of the franchise. 

I have a rough understanding of setting for HL2; however, I have never played any of the games myself. To familiarise myself with the Half-Life fiction, I will be watching gameplay and using reference images, so I can understand the setting, gameplay styles and context of Half-Life. This will allow me to more closely follow the Half-Life style of level design and get more out of the source engines features. 

Blocking out 

Before blocking out my level I planned out each sequence in note form. This helps me to have a clearer idea of the exact interactions I want to happen and identify any big continuity errors in the level. Like the player needing to have a specific item to solve a puzzle at a specific point in the level. 

My main goal for this first block-out is to get something rapidly playable so that I can test if the concept has any potential to be fun or not. I got this approach from a tutorial where Steve Lee talks about designing levels "skateboard first", which effectively means creating an MVP or having something playable at every stage of development (See Figure 1). So far this has been very useful for focusing my attention on the gameplay and how the level should be designed to extract the best experience. 

Figure 1: Skateboard approach to development (KNIBERG, 2016) 

I started by creating a basic layout for the apartment. The idea here is that the player has found the apartment room where the target is hiding, but the combine come out of the room and begin the ambush before you make it to the door. In the future I want to make the door explode for a bit of dramatic effect and to hopefully create a sense of surprise. However, to achieve this I will need to learn how to create scripted events, so for the purpose of creating something playable, I have not added this yet. 

Figure 2: My first block out of the apartment section 

After the ambush the players main goal will be to escape the apartment. I began experimenting with the idea of designing the combat around a particular weapon, the gravity gun, a weapon which works by picking up props and using them as projectiles. I want to try out this idea because I think it could be an interesting design choice that would force the player to use everyday objects like furniture as weapons. In the picture below I have placed several boxes to test this feature. Next week I am planning on expanding the staircase, so I can test this feature properly with different object types. 

Figure 3: First blockout of the staircase section and me thinking about how I could design combat around the gravity gun. 

level not reloading issue 

While learning how to create a skybox, I ran into an issue where my changes from the level editor weren’t updating in the build. This was highly frustrating as it meant that I could not test how my changes effected the gameplay. After doing some research, I thought that the issue was caused by my node graph being "out of date". I soon realised that this was not the case as the node graph is responsible for controlling NPC behaviour, which would not affect the map updating. 

Upon further inspection I found out that the issue was caused by me setting up the skybox using a very complex method that requires a sky camera and light environment (ALEXSCOTT20, 2023). 

I have decided to use a simpler method, where you place walls with a skybox texture where you want the sky to be. This taught me that using a simpler method is sometimes better as it can have a similar result while also saving time. Following this method has given me more time to focus on the important things like layout design and pacing.