Colony 7 Project - Blog 5 - Topic and Testing

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 colonising 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.

The group part of the project has concluded. We have now been asked to pick a specific in game item e.g. mechanic, aesthetic, prefab or system to fine tune - test and implement changes.

I have chosen to develop and implement a guidance system for the user to more easily traverse to mission objectives. Our project was lacking direction for the user so i found this to be very important to communicate to the user where to go in game.

I tried many different ways to implement including:

- An off screen target system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQpR1GN0Os

- Off screen indicator - dynamic arrows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO79GIaVLg0

These systems did not work, this was probably due to my limited knowledge in programming and trying to implement these ideas into the programmers code was out of my skill set.

I then decided to make a very simple system using the OnTriggerEnter function in C#.

After a lot of trail and error i have the following solution working:

•I used point light set to yellow as a highlight and an arrow prefab to add a sense of direction for the user.

Triggers were placed in between each objective directional icons to trigger as the user walked through them and spaced so the user could clearly see them and get led in a certain direction.

•OnTriggerEnter enables the objective directional icon.

•OnTriggerExit disables the objective directional icon.

•Objective directional icon is destroyed 3 secs after OntriggerExit is triggered. The result is below:

This proved to be a successful way to direct the user toward the next objective point.