June 2 – June 7

Last week, I finished the interior of the Cathedral. For the first few days of this week, I created the outdoor area on the far side of the gate at the end of the Cathedral. The player doesn’t actually see that much of this outside section, but it’s a small part of the scene that adds a whole lot. This was the first time I used Unity’s terrain system, so it was definitely fun to learn the basics of this new tool.

After completing the outside part, I spent a day adding some fog and some light shafts to the windows of the Cathedral. I was disappointed to find out that we wouldn’t be using real volumetric lights for the light shafts(because they’re very performance heavy and we want to keep the game running smoothly), but on the bright side, what we did use was a plane with a shader added onto it to make it have the appearance of a light shaft. I haven’t really used shaders before either, so this was another cool introduction to an unfamiliar part of game development! The fog and light shafts look okay, but once we get to lighting the scenes I think they’ll look much better.

To wrap up the week, I started on the last level we need for the soft launch coming soon – the tutorial level! Now I’ve started playing around with the layout and which pieces I’ll be using, but nothing’s solid yet. I’m still in the process of designing the level to not only include segments where the player learns how to shoot, but a segment where the player is forced to use the teleport gun. The latter part complicates the designing of the level a bit because I have to stick to the theme of a basement.