Like most things you need the ability to adapt while working on something to reach the end. In this case, there ended up being a few changes along the way. The first change being the zone name itself. Secondly, I changed how I thought I would go about the floors as it just made more sense for the amount of time I was putting into this zone and my skill level. Finally, how many floors I ended up having in this zone.
I’m not one of those with formal training and since I’m a solo game developer I don’t have a lengthy pre-design process most of the time. A lot of what I end up creating ends up being from within that situation and how it evolves as I progress through it.
This also means I will have some failures and even mid-design changes. While that can sometimes cost an hour or more of time as a setback I’ve learned to adapt as I’m going along. As that is often required of you anyway as the vision you see, whatever plans you make and how it ends up are not always 100% in line with each other anyway. Some of the cooler things in my zones are from mistakes anyway!
Zone Name And Design Change
Originally this zone was going to be called the spire. I do prefer the name of the zone to have a bit of an impact on at least from my point of what it ends up becoming. I always pick the name early on as it helps guide my vision of it forward.
The biggest issue here with some thought and a little work done is it was never going look very spire-like. Staircases have always been a struggle for me. With the meshes I’m using in a 3D space everything needs to be in pixel-perfect position otherwise you get a single pixel in length gap that the player will notice if they are looking at something the wrong way. Even with some of the settings enabled in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) like snapping to grid, it can still happen with over 3k meshes making up this zone.
As such after the first floor was done my overall feeling for the zone changed that it was going to be more of a tower than a spiral. I was not going to have the main spiral staircase connecting all the floors as it was a disaster in my attempt to make it. I deleted it one early morning without think of getting a screenshot of it. Thankfully it's gone forever!
That overall had quite an impact on how I needed to layout each floor of this zone. Since I was not going for a more spiral ascends though the level the floors. I could have the staircase connecting each floor where ever I wanted. As a result, it makes things less predictable in exactly where the next set of stairs up will be. Granted once the player learns this zone and with some best guess their first run it should not be hard to know where they are.
Number Of Floors
Many times the size of the zone I end up creating has some heavy restrictions on it making it the size they end up becoming. While I do have deadlines in mind that play when I want them finished I’m usually ahead of them enough where I can spend the time if needed. The restriction usually comes in the form of how long it takes to run through a zone before game mechanics like doors and monsters to fight are added in. There is also the performance for the player and on my computer system building out a level to keep a mind on as well.
There are many professionals out there who can easily spend twenty or more hours just designing a small area that takes the player maybe 30 secs to walk on though. While I’m nowhere near that skill level this zone in its entirety took a couple of days in its current state with more to add later on giving the player around 7-8 mins to run through it.
While 8 mins do not sound long once you add in monsters to fight and other things I’m hoping it will take the player around 15 mins if they go for a full clear. Regardless of what I was thinking for this zone that amount of time has worked for me in the past. I also don’t want the zones to take so long the player becomes bored or discouraged in completing it.
Originally I had thought this zone was going be five floors in total. I ended up shaving it down to just 4. There comes a point where the size of the zone starts to require a heavy hand of optimization which I tend to do a fair amount of anyway. I also have my limitations to keep in mind.
From the screenshot such as the one seen in this post cover image, I was sitting around 4 FPS. Which as you can imagine would be a terrible laggy environment to work in a zone from. Thankfully once I’m a bit closer and putting in individual walls and ceilings I’m sitting at a nice 80+ fps in the viewport in UE4. Depending on what I’m even working on there are a few things I could disable in the engine itself if things are struggling that bad for me.
While I won’t know for certain the player's performance for my hardware until I compile out the game. I believe from my testing it should be decent. This takes into consideration my own experience with building a few levels and understanding how many meshes, working with the meshes before, and the time it takes to run through the zone itself.
While playtesting from UE4 itself helps. It’s not a perfect situation it does however beat spending half a day to compile out another version and work out any major bugs that pop up during that process just to run through a single zone. Even more so since there are some preference hits coming down the line once I add in creatures, background music, and further zone effects if needed.
Final Thoughts
Always interesting how these levels turn out and I still enjoy working on them. The above screenshot was after just a few meshes had been laid down on the first floor as I was starting to work on the zone. You really would not think much of it.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.
Game roadmap.
