Week 4

This week I continued blocking out the apartment. My main problem has been getting the scaling right for the staircase. Currently the staircase is very narrow, which is something I want to do to create tension, however the staircase is currently too narrow for combat with the gravity gun to work properly, because the does not have enough room to pick items up and move around with them. I think this issue has mostly been caused by a lack of knowledge on how to use Hammer's scaling tools properly. To fix this I want to spend some more time on learning the basic tools. This will allow me to scale my levels properly and save me from spending hours trying to get the placement of a staircase to match up properly. 

I got the idea of using enclosed spaces to reflect tension and open spaces to reflect achievement from a short Q&A talk with co-lead level designer at Naughty Dog, Emilia Schatz (Critical Path, 2018) I will give updates on how this goes over the coming weeks. 

Similarly to how I played HL2 last week to get inspiration for my level, I played the Little Nightmares 2 Demo to gather inspiration for my team module. However, I ended up having some ideas for how I could use light to direct the player for my HL2 level. In the Little Nightmares 2 Demo, bright spotlights (often white) are used to signify the most important areas or something the player can interact with. 

Figure 5: A screenshot taken from Little Nightmares 2 Chapter 1 

In figure 5, you can see how the centre of the screen is brightly lit to highlight the handle hanging down from the ceiling, while the rest of the screen has been left dark. Although using lighting to draw attention to certain areas is a simple technique and something I was already aware of, seeing it being used in two professional quality games, has inspired me to use lighting in the same way in my own level.