Colony 7 Project - Blog 3 - Finishing Animations and designing the HUB / Tutorial level

We have been asked as Part of our Studio 1 projects to keep a log of achievements and issues during the process of our group assessment.

I am one of the level designers for the project.

The project is called Colony 7 the basic premise is as follows:

Concept Theme

Sci-fi adventure game with Rogue-like attributes.

Colony 7 is a 3-D Third Person Adventure, Exploration game with Rogue-like and Survival elements. A colonizing ship is sent to a distant planet and tasked with gathering resources in order to populate the planet. The journey begins when the colonists take their first steps onto the wondrous new land and build their homes but they are not alone… Colony 7 is also inhabited by hostile humanoids and many other dangers.

My first job was to finish off all animations for the Characters. Using mixamo to rig the characters (add skeletons) and add the appropriate animations. As mentioned in my last post the hardest thing was making sure there is minimal distortion of the character when the were animating. The animations needed were die and attack. I tried to use different animations for each character to give them a sense of character.

With this complete the building the tutorial / hub level was next.

The users HUB is a spaceship, so i had to thing of logical things needed e.g. rooms and other aesthetics that would portray this visually. I decided to make it a long structure from left to right, giving the sense of the internal shape of the ship Will had designed.

The first design:

After discussion with the other designers i created the next designs with emphasis on following the narrative and representing it more clearly. Exits were added to help the player have a sense of leaving the ship to other sides of the planet. After play testing the rooms were made smaller and brought closer together to shorten time need for the player to traverse the hub.

Adjustments were further made (after further play testing) Walking through the narrative of the tutorial. The armory (top right room) was made smaller and the shooting range move to allow the user clearer sight of the target and quicker completion of the weapons training.

The final design after further play testing

As thing is to be the HUB the players return to in between missions i worked on it quiet a bit, fine tuning each room to a specific purpose.