DMUGA Week 33 - Aaand Done! (FMP #20)
FMP POST-MORTEM PAGE: http://markeastland.wix.com/blog#!blank/l7v7i
Weekly Summary:
Finalisation week including organisation, gathering references for the post-mortem, rendering, final tweaks/polish on the level and packaging. Chaos ensued!
Monday - Wednesday:
There were still things which needed to be polished, so I went around finding any issues, things out of place, or anything which wasn't how it should be.
I also made some white paint decals using the Z-brush stamps I made a while back for sculpting. These were to be placed in areas the players would see and add a tiny bit more coherency to the story.
The destructible floor was still very flat and didn't suggest any sign of weakness, so I made the floor a bit even as Andy suggested. This would then indicate to the player that it isn't as sturdy as they might think.
Looking at this now, we could have made it a bit more disturbed to make it more obvious.
Lastly, I re-textured the claw to be used inside the cave (Excuse the ridiculous bloom on it):
Together as a team:
-Dom made a fly-through of the level with Denise, Andy and I directing him on where to place them & the duration of the shots. Unfortunately all of this wasn't saved, so if we wanted to make another video, all of this would have to be done again.
-Andy and I sat down and figured out how to make roots in Speed Tree, just to add a bit more to the cave environment.
-Andy and I also went through the level to find things to tweak and finish off the foliage population.
-Andy helped me re-texture the tongue for the inner cave.
Dom figured out the reason why the decals wouldn't work on the boat blueprint... It was a silly reason but it's good he fixed that, along with:
-Added wood footstep sounds
-Made it easier for us to change the time you spend in the boat ride with the option to change the duration of the fade-out.
-Added my new destructible wall mesh.
-Removed the keyboard button cheats he put in to make it easier for us to edit the level.
-Showed me how to add any text/image widgets to the level if we need them.
Thursday - Friday:
On the Thursday, we:
-Fixed glitches getting out the map
-Fixed getting stuck in certain areas
-Got rid of the rest of our cheat keyboard keys to test the level ready for the final build
-Populated a little bit more
-Added a couple of more sounds
-Dom found a really nice and quick way of downsizing textures on the fly so we downsized quite a few
-Finally came around to building the lighting of production quality.
As a team we worked to get it to where were all happy, fixed 99% of the problems we had, and went to build the lighting on production... Of course this could only end with it being incomplete by the time the labs shut, so we had to leave it building over night...
This of course went wrong in so many ways!
-Foliage was broken, Dom tried to fix it and built again but had to go for his driving test.
-I stayed up late and took some renders of the level making me knackered in the morning and took over after Dom left in the morning.
-We then couldn't package it properly
-Also had to re-build the lighting on just preview (which looked fine in the end).
Last second problems with getting the level to start as it should was a nightmare. I didn't expect everything to go nuts on the one day it really counted as we had tested it numerous times, fixed all the bugs, performed test builds... and yet it still broke!
Final Level Beauty Shots:
