BLOCKOUT to Final

Pre-Production

During pre-production, the programming team had showed us a neat little town building sim called "Townscaper", the overall aesthetic was incredibly similar to Jumpstart and was just overall a great tool to build fun little towns.

So we started using Townscaper for some early map designs.

Townscaper is a really intuitive tool and was super easy to pick up and use, we had done about a dozen possible designs and layouts for our town but decided to go with this one here with the difficulty curve rising as the player progress.

The layout starts out wide and open with plenty of room for the player to take in their surroundings and be prepared for any oncoming zombies.

But further up the hill the streets become more narrow leaving the player less breathing room and more subject to be ambushed by more hoards of zombies if they're not careful enough.

I also want the scene to have multiple paths that leads to exit of the area, which gives me the opportunity to allow players to explore and investigate around the environment for possible new weapons and ammo.

Alpha 0.1

Going into the first alpha build and the art team already blocking out some assets I started undergoing the design.

I stayed true to the narrowing streets structure but slightly tweeked the overall layout to better support VR Locomotion.

I segmented each area with tall and grand towers to use as landmarks in the alpha builds so players would understand where they are. Without the use of some sort of landmark or anything unique to particular areas, the town would feel the same all the way through, so I kept note of this going into beta.

Alpha 0.2

One major change was adding this corner to the thrid and fourth area. Our Creative Director (Adam Jensen) had thought this area was way too narrow and needed some more variation while scaling up the mountain and I couldn't agree more.

He sent me mock up screen shot of how I the roads towards the goal could be a little more interesting and wanted a rounded corner with minor hills on each side, So I went into work and implemented the changes and immediately the path towards the tower felt fresh again.

It also gave me new opportunities for hidden ammo and weapon placements for the player to discover.

Beta 0.1

From this point on it was about polishing the layout. If you're wondering why the buildings haven't changed all that much in terms of colour, its because we had one environment artist working on nearly 10 different things at once, so she spent most of that time finalizing and fixing a number of different assets in the environment as well as doing the textures for the ground, buildings and foliage.

On my side of things I was slightly tweeking particular placements of assets and making adjustments to the scenery so that everything made sense within context.

During this period I spent most of my time adjusting the scene so that it was more visually appealing to the eyes now that we had finalized the overall layout and how the player will path towards their objective.

Beta 0.2

Progressing further into beta and a majority of the scene nicely textured, we moved into QA and play testing.

One major thing that completely flew over our heads was a tutorial. A few play testers didn't understand the mechanics of the game and was further held back by some interaction bugs that made things twice as difficult to learn the game.

So Tutorial Alley was constructed to act as the tutorial area for the player to learn all of the important mechanics of the game. (Which only consisted of grabbing items, reloading and using the weapon wheel).

From now on the player will start in this area and will learn how to make use of the games core mechanics, with the exit blocked by a gate with a red glowing pad lock, so when the player is comfortable with their weapons and mechanics, they can shoot off the pad lock to proceed into the world.

Gold [Final]

And finally finishing off with the final build.

Finalizing Jumpstart was one of the most stressful experiences I've had while in Game Dev so that was a lot of fun haha.

If I wasn't working on the main level I spent a good chunk of my time play testing and bug reporting as much as I could.

I had many sleepless nights dialing up and tweaking assets to make the environment more visually appealing for players and I think it was worth the effort in the end with the positive feedback I was given by my mentors. I think the comment that stuck with me the most was "This doesn't look like a Unity Game".

I think one thing I did really well was separating each area to be unique and different from the last despite using the same modular assets for all the buildings.

I talked about how I want each area to feel unique from one another other, otherwise everything would look the same which would make it easier for players too feel lost.

So I setup landmarks using unique assets and coloured buildings to make each area recognizable at a glance.

Some areas I painted the wooden beams a different colour so that stood out from the rest of the environment, other areas had unique models and so on so fourth. I think this worked in my favor because I never saw any play tester get lost or lose sight of their objective. Even if they did go off the set path and ran into a dead end of some sort I would make it worth their time by providing some ammo and maybe even a new weapon.

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