Year 3 Major Project – Additional Work

As this project needed additional work to get it up to a higher standard, I tried to organise the extra time I had and break down stages for what I wanted to implement.

The World

The first task was to flesh out the environment a bit more, so there was more to take in when playing the game and more vessels to deliver lore and narrative to the player.

From here I could continue to build the environment around the village, using the verticality to my advantage and surrounding the different levels with more mountains.

Invisible walls were added in order to stop the player from dropping off the edges, as there would be no way backup (and I haven’t implemented a health bar/fall damage at this point). There is also an invisible wall just before entering the village, which is used to trigger a quick cinematic shot of the village.

The firepit in the village is also working now. The robotic character you see here is a place holder for something more suited to the project. One of the first changes I wanted to make was changing the game a 3rd person experience, so that players can see how the character fits into the environment and aesthetic. It’s kind of ironic that the placeholder character looks like a robot abandoned here from the future and should be replaced with a more high-fantasy/medieval character as soon as possible to build into the immersion instead of work against it.

Dialogue

Moving into 3rd person here has caused some issues with controls when it comes to interacting with the NPC’s during dialogue. As the mouse can still change the ‘looking’ direction during these ‘conversations’, it becomes awkward to try and click the responses for push the dialogue along. I will endeavour to find a way to fix this or at least mitigate how frustrating it is.

An easy way to get around this would be to change the design of the game so that the player never actually speaks to others, simply stands there and “listens” to what the character says, which automatically moves forward until finished. Ideally, I would like to include the players response, as I think this kind of control over a character makes it the overall experience more engaging.