PDP Week 11

I have now come to the last week of my personal development plan, and finished off with a comprehensive level which exhibits the knowledge I've collected over the previous 10 weeks. So this final week is dedicated to me documenting my conclusion to summarise my own personal growth throughout this learning process. A huge thing I learned right off the bat was the Unreal Engine 4 software, with me spending so much time with it for this project I really learned how to navigate the software much more efficiently, along with figuring out how to choose the right tool or technique for the job. I began this PDP with basic knowledge on UE4 since I'd used it previously for the programming module, but before this process I didn't even know there was an asset list showing all of the objects in the current scene! Something like that is critically useful for professional organisation in the games industry, as you can hide and show certain assets in your engine if you just want to work on something in particular (such as a corridor with all of the ghosts and lights removed without physically removing them, since they made get in the way during the creation process). So looking back at my previous self-development plan and research, I’ve really improved my level design skills compared to what I’d said previously inside them. Especially since I’ve only had limited experience with level design in general before this PDP.

One of the main level design techniques I learned from this process, which I tried to enforce into my own work, was the method of teaching players by showing, not telling. Letting players figure things out on their own with just having subtle hints for them to follow really leads to the thrill of exploration when they figure something out, and the three main areas of my level help highlight this since they all teach this concept in their own ways, but go about it in a completely different process to each other. The bounce-pad section (and first one I did) probably spends the most time teaching the player its mechanics with the most gradual learning curve, whereas the last area (the tunnel) threw the player into it at a much faster pace. Its good variety I feel and helps the different sections feel more unique, since the player will remember all three areas without having one specific place feel generic or uninteresting.

The level I created visually may not look fantastic graphically, however the blocked-colour visual style is quite fitting which creates quite an abstract style for the game which suits the level design. The focus on this PDP was to improve my level design though, so the graphics were never the main priority. It still feels very abstract, with the level being suspended in the air over a flooded city, it adds some more tension to the platforming sections of the level design since when the player looks down as they're jumping over high gaps, it has a very large sense of scale to it. Some of the extra touches like the buildings in the background, the seagulls and butterflies I do also like though. It helps make the level feel a bit more alive, and the grand cityscape of this game isn't populated almost entirely by unmoving static meshes this way.

I also did a video walkthrough of the level to demonstrate a playthrough in its entirety, viewable on Youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oSeX5q8lOs&feature=youtu.be

A few things that surprised me throughout the development of my level was how fiddly Unreal 4 could be at times. As I thought in theory level design was just dragging and dropping assets from the library, however there’s a lot more to it than that. You have to structure it in the correct way and place, rotate and resize various objects individually by hand, likewise Unreal 4 can be very buggy at times. Like when it hangs for long periods of time or freezes completely, which is why I made a point to save as often as I could: to damage control the software and potentially not lose lots of work if something went wrong.

I feel that I managed my time well throughout the project’s development, however I did finish my 11 weeks earlier than expected. Because I completed a PDP entry once a week for 11 weeks, I finished earlier than timetabled (as I was filling them out by actual weeks and not the timetabled ones, so for example I would fill out 2-3 entries in the Easter break before we even came back to uni). Because of this did I have time to go back and check my previous entries to improve them, however I could have given myself more time to work on some of these entries during the whole timeframe.

I really enjoyed watching people’s reactions as they played through my level, and also taking their constructive feedback to make it better and appeal to a variety of people. I really didn’t enjoy some of the bugs in Unreal 4 though, which really hampered the development process (especially the aforementioned freezing bugs when I saved the project which sometimes made development a chore). Likewise I found programming some of the elements both fun and frustrating, fun to experiment with it and see your creation finally work, but also frustrating when something goes wrong and you can’t find the source of the problem. I feel I could have spent more time programming to improve my skills with it, even though I didn’t enjoy parts of the creation process. However the focus of my PDP was level design so I feel I spent a good amount of time working on it.

I received peer feedback throughout the development of my level, and I feel the views of others really helped me to improve my level in areas where I’d overlooked them. For example, when I couldn’t get death working in the level originally and used invisible walls to block the player instead. This came back to bite me however when I received some peer feedback, as a few people claimed the invisible walls to be annoying and something that broke the immersion of the game. This encouraged me to give death another chance and find another way to incorporate it.

To conclude though this PDP has very much helped me improve as a person, and Unreal 4 especially still has a lot of untapped potential I didn't even touch upon (like the landscaping tool) that I can continue to research and investigate in my spare time. If I were to do this task again I’d definitely try to include more skills and techniques, to teach myself a larger variety of mechanics inside Unreal 4, as in a way I played it a bit ‘safe’ and should strike to leave my comfort zone more often. Also if I were to migrate into the games industry specialising in level design, I feel I'd be more confident in my abilities of creating a fun level for a professional retail game due to the practise I did with my PDP. It helped create an environment where I could just test different theories and concepts to see what did and didn't work (like me not implementing a death system into the project and using invisible walls everywhere instead), while also realising my mistakes and improving upon them as knowledge to take into the future (such as me understanding why invisible walls can be a bad idea as they break the player's immersion, so I worked towards implementing death into my game instead so I could safely remove them all and create a much more fun experience). But overall I enjoyed the time I spent creating my level for my PDP, and I’d like to give level design another go in the future.